


Tom Petty

by Therru



Series: Kissing Families [4]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Flashbacks, Multi, this is as tame as this series has ever been or ever will be again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:33:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24048235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Therru/pseuds/Therru
Summary: Molly and Walter interrupt Will's newly-invigorated alcoholism and force some semblance of a good time on him.
Series: Kissing Families [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/254524
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. Something with a Ship on the Bottle

ENTR’ACTE

_They sloshed through the water, hand-in-hand, gumboots creating wavelets that rippled their way to the nearest desks, fallen timbers, and shelves of ruined books. The grey pool that was the classroom floor reflected the ceiling lights that no longer worked, and the sun streaming in through the shattered windows. It was eerie, but somehow peaceful in the abandoned school. Not enough time had passed yet for spirits to haunt the halls, and the disaster was too widespread for ghosts to have any interest in congregating in this one place. Molly climbed onto her desk at the front of the room – the only one still standing. Will watched her legs swing as she kicked her boots against the sturdy wooden table and surveyed the wreckage around them. She had a black eye and a split lip, and her arm was in a cast. But that’s not what troubled her. Two of her students died in the storm. Someone’s daughter, and someone’s son. Molly was too practical to feel guilty for not being able to save them, but that didn’t stop her from being so sad she could hardly bear it. Will wrapped his arms around her, feeling the ache in her heart from deep within himself. There was no need to say it, but they both said it anyway. “Everything’s going to be different now.”_

“Molly?”

“Hi Will.”

As he opens the screen door, Will’s first instinct is to scan the area for a threat of some sort. None is apparent. His second instinct is to blink several times to make sure he isn’t seeing things. “Hi…”

“Um…” Molly scratches her head and wrinkles her nose a little. “Can we stay here for a couple days?”

She has a boy of eight or nine by her side, clinging to her gloved hand and smiling brightly up at Will. He is also hopping from foot to foot.

Will holds the door open for them. They stamp their boots off and step into the hall. The dogs, of course, come bounding out of the living room to greet the newcomers. Reflexively, Will says, “They’re friendly.”

“Walter, baby, say _hi_ ,” Molly coaxes, once the barking and sniffing of hands has stopped.

“Hi.” The boy sticks out his hand, and, bemused, Will shakes it. “Can I use your bathroom?”

“Yeah. It’s–”

The kid has already zoomed off.

“I guess he’ll find it.”

Molly picks Walter’s coat up off the floor – where it landed after being zipped out of lightning fast – and hangs it on the hook next to her own. “He’s had to go for like an hour, but I was worried he’d freeze his little balls off. You live really far out!”

“Molly, what are you doing here?”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out with a whoosh. “We’re kind of between places right now. We really just need to crash for like a day or two.”

Will rubs both hands over his face. When he’s as certain as he can be that he’s not dreaming, he nods and says, “Oh. Okay.”

Molly follows Will to the kitchen, where he starts a pot of coffee, hoping it will help him to regain some mental balance.

“I’d really appreciate it, Will.” Molly rests her forearms on the countertop and drums the surface with her fingertips.

Will turns to face her. She actually looks nervous. “Of course,” he hastens to say. “Yeah. Of course, you can stay. You just surprised me… obviously.”

“Yeah…” She wrinkles her nose again and bites the inside of her cheek. “I don’t really know where to start.”

“Mom?”

Molly straightens up. “In here, baby,” she calls.

The boy appears in the kitchen doorway, sliding on his socked feet. He skates over to them and Molly puts her arms around his shoulders. “This is my son, Walter. Walter, this is Will.”

“I know.” Walter rolls his eyes at her; the way kids do when grownups are being silly.

“I’m just being polite, you little brat.” She pinches his cheeks when he looks up at her.

“You’re such a nerd, Mom.”

She puts a hand over his mouth.

Despite still feeling completely adrift, Will can’t help but smile. “Do you want a drink, kid?”

“Can I have a glass of milk?”

“Please,” Molly says, flicking him on the shoulder.

“Please,” Walter adds.

Will pours him one and then takes two mugs from the cupboard. “Do you want coffee?” he asks Molly.

“Good Lord, yes.”

Walter pokes her arm. “Please.”

Molly laughs. “Mm. Please.”

Without thinking, Will puts a lump of sugar and a splash of milk in each, and hands one of the mugs to her. She opens her mouth and closes it again, then simply takes a sip and says, “That’s a good cup of coffee.”

“That’s generous of you.” Will leads them back down the hall to the living room. “I’ve been told it’s barely a step up from instant.”

Molly rolls her eyes as they seat themselves on the couch. “By the world’s biggest snob?”

He snorts before he can help it.

“To be fair, we’ve been on the road for fifteen hours, so I’m not picky at this point.” She takes a long drink, then holds the coffee in her lap and looks over at Walter.

He has already dropped to his knees and is playing tug-o-war with Zoe. Whenever he lets her win, her own momentum makes her reel back a foot or two, and then she dashes back to him, drops the toy in his lap and yips excitedly. “Walter loves dogs.” Molly takes another sip and asks, “When did you become such a sucker for them?”

“You get a lot of strays in the area.” Will shrugs. “They’re good company. You always had a soft spot for them,” he adds.

“Still do.” She smiles. “But they love Walter. He’s one of them.”

As though to prove it, the boy initiates a race with Buster, tearing across the floor on all fours. Zoe chases after them with the toy. Will lets out a faint chuckle.

“So, listen,” Molly begins. “I don’t want to mess with your schedule. If you need to go to work tomorrow or anything, Walter and I will go out.”

Unhelpfully, Will says, “Okay.”

“Um… I didn’t see a car out there.” She goes on to offer, “Do you need a ride?”

Will thinks to tell her something along the lines of _it’s in the shop_ , but in the end just shakes his head and sticks to a very abbreviated truth. “I’m working from home ’til after New Year’s. Thanks, though.”

“Well, maybe we should go out anyway, ’cause I definitely can’t promise peace and quiet.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Walter takes a break from playing with the dogs to crawl onto the couch next to Molly and be human for a bit. “What do you do?” he queries.

“I… teach? Sort of. I guess.”

Walter seems satisfied, somehow. “Mom’s a teacher, too. Did you know that?”

Will nods.

Molly sets her empty cup on the coffee table and stretches. “I think Will’s students are a little older, honey.” The last word is lost in an impressively gaping yawn.

Will finishes off his coffee and stands up. “Do you want to bring your stuff in? I’ll go make up the bed.”

“You really don’t need to do that, Will. Both of us can sleep pretty much anywhere. Watch this one pass out on the floor later.” She jerks her thumb at Walter. “I’m serious.”

“Well, then I guess you’ll have the bed all to yourself.”

“C’mon… This is a perfectly good sofa!”

Will folds his arms and simply says, “No. That’s not happening.”

“I should have known.” Molly shakes her head and laughs softly as he leaves the room.

In the bedroom, Will allows his panic to wash over him in carefully controlled waves. _Five minutes_ , he decides. Five minutes to have a melt-down and then get it together.

 _This isn’t about you_ , he tells himself firmly. _Molly is family. You do weird, random, unexpected shit for family._ The words are true, but they come to him in Abigail’s voice, sounding like an accusation.

Squeezing his eyes shut and putting his head between his knees, he begins building yet another fort. He takes deep, purposeful breaths, each inhale and exhale a stone in that fort. Stone by stone, he walls Abigail and Hannibal inside.

He makes a detour on his way back to the living room, taking the latest bottle of aftershave from the back of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He dusts it off, breaks the seal, and guiltily dumps half of it down the drain. Then he dabs some on his neck and replaces it in the cupboard, closer to the front. He takes a few more deep breaths before leaving the bathroom.

Molly has collected a large duffel bag and a backpack from the car, and Will shows her and Walter to the bedroom. She extracts a change of clothes and asks if she can have a shower to wake up.

Walter hops onto the bed and pulls a book from the backpack, slouching against the wall with an ankle crossed over the opposite knee. It’s an effective book stand. Will is surprised that a kid with so much energy can power down so easily, but Walter apparently has at least _two_ settings. He leaves him in peace with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and returns to the living room to try and get some work done.

He gives himself another five minutes to check the integrity of his forts, then dives in. Soon enough, he is able to do what he always counted on being able to do – submerge himself in work, muting the rest of reality. He doesn’t hear the water shut off. He doesn’t see Molly poke her head in the door or hear her pad back to the bedroom. A couple hours later, he does catch the scent of frying garlic, and starts to wrap it up.

Molly comes in and announces there is dinner for anyone who’s hungry. She sits down next to him, resting her elbow on the back of the sofa and her cheek against her palm. “I’m sorry we just showed up on your doorstep. I tried calling…”

“I got a new number when – a while ago.” Will tucks loose papers into the textbook he’d been going through and sets it on the coffee table before turning to her.

One hand is playing absently with her fringe. She smiles at him.

“Molly… Are you in trouble?”

She sighs and laughs a little. “Yeah, I guess that’s kinda what this looks like, huh?”

“Kinda.” His mouth quirks up.

“Nah,” she says. “We’re fine. Just time to move on.”

“Promise?”

She nods, and her smile doesn’t fade. Molly was always honest with her smiles. Will relaxes slightly.

She must have noticed the tension leave his shoulders, because she gives his arm a quick squeeze before pushing off the couch. “You’re a very sweet man. Let’s eat.”

Molly and Walter play cards after dinner. Will tries to read but doesn’t take in much. He keeps glancing at them over the top of his book, trying to reconcile the fact that he was sure he’d never see Molly again with the fact that she’s here. He doesn’t rule out the possibility that he might be hallucinating. _Stranger things_.

“Bedtime,” Molly announces at 8pm. “Teeth, little man.”

“Where are my PJs?”

“In the car, I bet. Go brush your teeth while I grab them.”

Molly goes out to the car and returns with pajamas for Walter, and a guitar.

“You stuck with it,” Will comments.

“Mhm.”

“Are you any good yet?”

Molly laughs aloud. “Shut up.” She hangs the pajamas on the space heater and leans the guitar against the wall. “Taught yourself to play?” She nods towards the piano in the corner of the room.

“It came with the place.”

“That’s not a _no_.”

“It was the opposite of therapeutic,” he says grimly. He can tell Molly wants to ask what he means, but, like so many times in the past, she spares him the agony of trying to explain.

Walter returns, and Molly chucks the warm pajamas at him.

“I’m not tired!” Walter whines.

“You can read for a little bit.”

“How many chapters?”

“One, mister!”

“Two?” Walter wheedles.

Molly laughs. “Just one, ’cause you have to catch me up after, remember?”

“Oh yeah. ’Night, Will!” he calls as he runs off.

“Where are _you_ sleeping?” Molly asks.

Reluctantly, Will answers, “There’s another bedroom upstairs.” He’d rather sleep on the couch, but then Molly would insist he take his bed back, and he’d guiltily have to admit there was a spare room he didn’t want to sleep in, and she’d say, _Well, Walter and I will sleep there, then,_ and that would be too much.

After nodding off three times, Will decides he can’t avoid it any longer. He turns off the space heater and lamps and makes his way down the hall. His bedroom door is open. The main light is off, but, as he passes, he can hear quiet talking and giggling, and sees the shadow of Walter’s arms waving animatedly as he recounts the chapters he’d read today. Will stands at the foot of the stairs for a long time, feeling very heavy. It’s only when Winston noses at the back of his leg that he starts to climb.

All the features of Abigail’s room are visible in the moonlight streaming through the open curtains. There is a thin layer of dust on most surfaces, but, other than that, it is perfectly clean and tidy. Just the way she left it. The little desk she’d acquired, still equipped with everything but her laptop. The pile of books on the windowsill. The only indication that anything is wrong is the wooden floorboard leaning against the far wall. The space below where it should be is empty, but Will can guess what Abigail had hidden there. Tools for a getaway, for when she would inevitably need them.

Mechanically, he strips down to his t-shirt and boxers and approaches the bed – the perfectly good bed he could sleep in if he could just make himself. He stands at the bedside for almost as long as he’d stood at the foot of the stairs, unable to even pull back the covers. There are still little divots in the duvet from the last time Abigail had lain here. He turns away. The chair will do.

Unsurprisingly, he dreams of her that night, in hundreds of thousands of screens rippling away into the distance, on and on and on.

He has had hundreds of thousands of internal arguments with himself since she left. More than that. Innumerable. But they’re all the same spool of circular logic:

_Just go get her._

_I don’t know where she is._

_You can figure it out._

_She doesn’t want that._

_You don’t know what she wants._

_I know she wants better than this._

_Be better then._

_I can’t. I’m never going to be better._

_Then you don’t deserve her._

_Exactly._

He’d trained this monologue into silence over the past few weeks, mostly by angrily regarding it as a waste of brain space, but Molly’s sudden reappearance seems to have jostled some of his barriers loose. 

It should be a comfort to think of those infinite possible universes, millions of which contain a happy Abigail. He doesn’t feel anything even approaching comfort, however, and, as always, wakes up just wishing he hadn’t fucked up this one.


	2. That's What Bookmarks Are For

The next morning, Will goes fishing. He invites Walter, but Walter says he’s at a super-exciting part in the book, and Will is able to save face only because Walter immediately goes back to reading. If Molly were in the room, his full-body and nigh audible sigh of relief would not have gone unnoticed.

He passes her in the living room on his way out, and Molly asks to borrow his laptop while he’s down at the stream. When he comes back, the radio is on and she’s making a pot of coffee, and there are about a thousand windows open on his desktop. Job openings, applications, apartments for rent, elementary schools in the area, local directories, and so on.

“Don’t close them!” Molly says anxiously when he goes to check his email. “I haven’t written any of it down yet.”

“You could just bookmark these, you know.”

“Ugh, but then I’d have to find them again!”

“No, that’s the… point…” He trails off as she puts a finger to his lips to shush him. “Never mind.” He smiles at her and takes paper and a pen from the drawer closest to him. Email forgotten, he goes systematically through the chaos on the screen, copying down any relevant information and closing each window, one by one.

“Sweet man,” Molly says, when she brings over a cup of coffee for him and sees what he’s been writing down. She gives him a kiss on the cheek.

They don’t make eye contact as Molly helps him gut the fish, chop some potatoes into wedges, and peel carrots. Not because Molly is shy, but because she knows not to expect it of him. Molly’s grey-green eyes are two of the very few he’d ever been able to stand looking into, though, and, now that she’s here, he doesn’t want her to feel she has to earn it all over again.

So, when the vegetables are in the oven, Will turns to Molly and very solemnly says, “Molly. I think you should leave.” He places a hand on her shoulder and looks her dead in the eyes. “I’m going to cut the onions now.”

Walter comes sliding in as Molly smacks Will and bursts out laughing. “I’m not _that_ bad.”

“I’m surprised you’re not crying already.”

“It’s true,” Walter tells Will. “I always have to cut them.”

Molly marches out of the kitchen with an exaggerated pout.

Walter snickers.

“It used to be my job,” Will tells him. “Here, you can do half. It’ll be faster.” He hands the boy a knife and, a little louder, says, “Then your mom can come out of hiding.”

They eat lunch together. Thankfully, Walter chatters through most of the meal, allowing Will a break from agonizing over his own inability to make small talk. Afterwards, Molly suggests they go for a drive and take a peek at Walter’s new school, so Will can have a couple hours to himself. Will is grateful, because he feels a headache coming on that has nothing to do with them and doesn’t feel up to explaining that.

Unable to either trawl textbooks for material or look at the computer screen for longer than five minutes at a time, he tries to sleep it off. But he’s filled with nervous restlessness, and feels exposed and guilty, napping on the couch in the middle of the day for no apparent reason. At a loss for what to do, he knocks back a whiskey, ruefully washing and replacing the glass in the cupboard, and takes himself upstairs to sleep on the chair in Abigail’s room with the loss of her at least temporarily muted.

When he wakes, he can see out the window that Molly’s car is once again in the drive. Walter is throwing snowballs and the dogs chase after them delightedly, not caring that they can’t actually catch them. Harley manages to intercept one before it hits the ground, and it explodes in a puff of powder on his nose, making him sneeze, which makes Walter fall down laughing.

Will goes downstairs and sees that Molly is outside as well, huddled in a parka and toque with her feet up on the railing. He brews a fresh pot of coffee, then bundles up, himself, and goes to join her on the porch.

“Hey,” she says brightly, taking the mug he offers her. “Thanks, babe.”

Will pulls a chair up next to her and stretches his legs out, trying to flex his hand discreetly. Simply carrying the weight of the full mug had apparently taken the life out of his arm. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to him. He might have cut down on the drinking (slightly), but he still hasn’t been doing his exercises. “How was it?”

“Not too exciting. We poked around a bit, but most of the blinds were closed. They’ve got a great playground, though. I don’t know if you noticed, but Wally’s got a lot of energy.”

“I did pick up on that.” After a minute he comments, “I hated moving when I was a kid. Walter seems more than fine with it.”

“He’s a pretty happy kid in general.”

A few more minutes pass, then Will ventures, “So you’re staying in Virginia?”

“I think that’s our plan, for now.”

“While we’re at it – _why_ Virginia?”

Molly shrugs the way she used to when she didn’t have a particularly good answer but wasn’t too concerned about the fact. “Remember my friend, Evelyn? She quit teaching a few years ago and opened up a shop in Reston. She said she’d give me a job if I couldn’t find work as a teacher.” She takes a sip of coffee, then adds, “Her kid, Tommy, he’s the same age as Walter.”

Will is puzzled by the way she says this, cavalier and self-conscious at the same time, as though it’s not a perfectly reasonable response.

She wrinkles her nose slightly and steals a glance at him.

He raises his eyebrows.

“And I guess… I might have liked the idea of seeing you again.”

“Oh,” he manages.

She leans her head back and laughs. “Charmingly oblivious, as always.”

“You can’t blame me for thinking I wouldn’t be top of your list.”

She gives him a knowing smile. “I can blame you for thinking you wouldn’t be on my list _at all_ , which is what you were really thinking.” She laughs again when he just drinks his coffee sheepishly. “Were you able to get any work done?”

“A bit, yeah,” he tells her, reasoning that attempting to do work was work in itself.

“What is it you’re working on, exactly?”

“VCU is going to start offering degrees in forensic sciences. They hired me to help develop the undergraduate program.”

“That sounds like it could be right up your alley. I know it’s a little more complex than helping me with my lesson plans, but you were always good at that.”

“It’s a nice change.”

It’s Molly’s turn to look puzzled. “I thought you liked teaching, too, though?”

“I do. It’s just a different pace. It’s nice for right now.”

She hums thoughtfully. “Well, that’s good, anyway.”

“When did _you_ go back to teaching?”

“About a year after Wally was born.” She smiles, maybe a little sadly, and adds, “I missed it, you know?”

Will nods. “You’re really piling that on there,” he observes, as Molly brings a tube of lip balm out of her pocket for the _n_ th time and smooths some onto her lips.

“Yeah… Well, I quit smoking when I got pregnant. Got addicted to _ChapStick_ instead. You don’t smoke any more either, huh?”

Will shakes his head.

“That’s good,” Molly says again. She leans back in the chair and closes her eyes. After a few minutes of winter sun on her face, she sighs contentedly. “It’s nice here.”

“I’m lucky here,” Will agrees. “I know that.”

She turns her face to look at him, smiling. “We’ll get out of your hair soon.” She closes her eyes again.

Will leans back, too, but finds himself scanning the landscape, perhaps looking for someone else to appear on the horizon.

That evening, Walter, with no preamble, asks Will if he has a ladder.

“I do… Why?”

Molly laughs at what Will assumes is a rather alarmed look on his own face. “We heard on the radio there’s going to be a meteor shower Monday night. Wally wants to go on the roof if it’s okay with you.”

On New Year’s Eve, Molly spends most of the day cooking. Carolina peas and rice, and skillet cornbread. She uses up some of Will’s whiskey making a brown sugar glaze for the ham she bought when she and Walter went on a firecracker run the day before. She asks if he had big plans for the stash of blackberries in his freezer. Will tells himself not to be stupid about it, and tells Molly to _go ahead and use whatever_ , and pushes down thoughts of the sunny afternoon he’d spent picking them with Abigail. There are still two one-gallon buckets left after Molly makes sweet dough pies for dessert.

At midnight, they set off the crackers on the front lawn. Will volunteers to be the one to light them, not eager to partake in the banging of pots and pans and whooping and yelling _Happy New Year!_ into the empty landscape. The dogs are delighted and add their barks to the cacophony. Molly and Walter cheer as each firecracker goes off, whistling into the night air and exploding in a shower of sparks. Will isn’t sure if it’s Walter or Molly who starts the snowball fight, or how he, himself, gets roped into participating.


	3. Pockets of Contentedness

Monday morning, Will wakes to the smell of fresh coffee. Not entirely unintentionally, he’d worked late last night, long after Molly and Walter went to bed, and had fallen asleep on the sofa. The room is freezing, but he can’t bring himself to move, or even open his eyes fully. Through his lashes, he sees Molly tiptoe past him to the front door. A few of the dogs hear the screen door squeak open and are immediately awake. He hears her whisper good mornings to them as she lets them out, and hears the sound of sliding metal as she locks the spring so the door won’t slam shut. A few minutes later, the front door opens again and the dogs shuffle back in, immediately coming to investigate whether or not Will is awake. He dangles an arm off the sofa and Zoe noses at it. Molly tiptoes back to the bedroom, all bundled up, arms full of clothes. She looks in on Will when she goes to hang her parka back up by the door.

“You awake?” she whispers.

Will takes his hand back from Zoe. “Yeah,” he says, forcing himself to sit up. He immediately regrets it. Goosebumps form on his bare arms and he does a full body shiver while he wraps the blanket around himself. “Jesus, it’s cold.”

“It’s snowing out,” Molly says. “How come you didn’t turn on the heater? You must be freezing.”

“Forgot. And when I remembered, it was all the way over there.”

“Well, come into the kitchen. It’s nice and warm. And caffeinated.”

He shoves his feet into his slippers and follows her to the kitchen, still clutching the blanket about him.

“I got an email crazy early this morning,” she tells him as she pours out coffee for them both. “There’s an elementary school that needs a fifth grade teacher for the spring semester and they want to interview today.”

“That was fast,” Will says, taking the mug she hands him and letting the warmth steal into his skin. He takes a sip, shivering again as the heat pushes back the cloak of cold and starts to spread through his limbs.

Molly smiles. “Good timing, I guess.” She sits across from him and blows on her coffee. “School starts in a week, so they must be desperate.”

“What time is the interview?”

“Ten thirty. In Waxpool. Would you mind keeping an eye on Walter? I was thinking of going to look at a few places afterwards.”

“Not at all.”

“Thanks, Will.”

Right on cue, Walter bounces into the kitchen. “Where are we going?”

“You’re not going anywhere, little man,” Molly says, rumpling his hair. “Anyone have to pee? I’m going to have a shower.”

“Me!” Walter cries.

“Of course.” Molly laughs as he hurtles off.

“Do you want some toast or something?” Will gets to his feet and raids the bread bin. There’s about half a loaf left.

“Mm, yes please. Thanks.”

He slices off a couple pieces and sticks them in the toaster. “What about you, kid?” he asks, when Walter reappears.

“Do you have jam?”

“Afraid not.”

Walter wrinkles his nose. “Then can I have cereal?”

“Please,” Molly calls over her shoulder as she goes into the bathroom.

A little while later, Will brings her the buttered toast, kept warm on top of the toaster until she was done in the shower and he was sure she’d be dressed.

She has one stockinged foot up on the bed and her skirt hitched up to her thigh, applying clear nail polish to a run in the side of her nylons. It soothes the panic that had steadily been building in his chest since he agreed to babysitting duties. He remembers fondly how she was always thrifty, without letting on to anyone else that they were both poor. Even when they’d eventually managed to haul themselves over the poverty line, it was a tough habit to break.

When she rejoins them in the kitchen, Will nudges another cup of coffee towards her across the counter, and Walter asks, “Where are you going?”

“I have a job interview. It’s not at your school, sweetie, don’t worry.”

He shrugs. “I don’t care, Mom.”

“Is that ’cause you have the coolest mom in the world?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Are you going to the store?”

“On the way back, maybe. Any special requests?”

“I think I finished the toothpaste last night. Sorry,” he adds to Will.

“There’s more in the bathroom cabinet,” Will reassures him.

“Do you want anything, Will?” Molly asks.

“No, thanks.”

Molly goes to brush her teeth. A few moments later, she calls from the bathroom, “You’ve been using the aftershave. Do you like it?” She reappears in the kitchen and says around her toothbrush, “Walter picked it out.”

The panic about how he’s going to keep the kid occupied for the day returning, Will latches on to this like a drowning man suddenly presented with a life preserver. “You like boats?” he asks Walter.

“Uh huh. Never been on one, though.”

Will thinks there’s probably at least a few hours’ entertainment beneath the dust cover in the shed. “I can show you what I was working on before. Maybe you can help me.”

“Before what?”

“I mean… just a while ago.”

Walter is beside himself with excitement when Will uncovers the husk of a little fishing sloop. The mast and rigging are slightly rusted in places, piled with the folded up sail next to the boat, but the varnished wood of the hull is quality, and Will had big plans for it a lifetime ago. Engine parts for an outboard motor still sit atop his workbench alongside the bits and pieces Abigail had relocated while setting up her bedroom.

Walter is a diligent assistant, evidently fascinated with every aspect of the project. Will was anticipating him getting bored after a rundown of the different tools they needed, but he sits on the bench top and passes Will items from his toolbox, all the while asking questions about everything. _Why does it need a motor? How big is the sail? How fast will it go? What’s that for again?_

They take a quick midday break for sandwiches. Walter demands, _How can you have peanut butter and not jam?!_ and Will replies, _Good question. I don’t have an answer to that one._ Then, they are back to boat business. Eventually, though, it becomes clear that, despite his intense focus, Walter needs to burn off some energy.

“Why don’t we let the dogs out?” Will suggests. “They haven’t been for a run today.”

“Can we work on the boat some more tomorrow?” Walter asks, already poised to zoom off.

“Sure thing.” Later, Will enlists his help again. “I thought we could surprise your mom. What do you think she’d want for dinner?”

Before he knows it, it’s evening, and Molly’s car is crunching up the drive, and the day hadn’t actually been all that stressful.

The front door opens and shuts, and they hear Molly’s cheerful _Hi, doggies!_

Walter hops to his feet, stashes his book on the window sill, and sets the table. Will closes his laptop and puts it aside as Molly enters the kitchen with a bag of groceries in each hand.

“You guys made dinner!” she exclaims.

“To celebrate your new job.” Will takes a bag from her and starts putting things away.

“How did you know I got it?”

Walter slides over, piping up, “We knew you’d get it.”

Molly giggles. “Well, you’re right, I did.”

“Hey look, kid. Jam.” Will holds out the freshly purchased jar of triple-berry.

Walter grabs it and sticks it in the fridge. “Thanks, Mom!”

“You’re welcome, sweetie.” She catches Will’s eye and nods at the bottle of scotch he’d just uncovered. “I used a whole bunch the other day. It’s the least I can do.”

_I’ve come to replenish your stores._

Before he can say anything, Molly is standing there in her wedding dress, covered in blood. It’s just a flash, but the image makes him reel.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, steadying himself. He clears his throat. “Just remembered about the meteor shower. I’m going to make sure it’s not too slippery on the roof. You two start without me.”

It takes a few minutes of standing out in the cold to tamp his panic back down to a manageable level. He didn’t really need to check it was safe up here. This section of roof is hardly sloped at all, and is demonstrably safe enough to even sleepwalk on. He does need to check for remnants of Abigail, though. He crouches down and, sure enough, one of her little tin foil ashtrays is wedged between the shingles and the window ledge. He can’t bring himself to throw it away, so, ridiculous as he feels, he stashes it in her room, replacing the loose floorboard over top of it. As he makes his way back downstairs, he tries to ignore the fact that she hadn’t bothered to replace the floorboard herself, and how purposeful that seems, and how it probably meant she had no intention of coming back.

Later, as Molly climbs through the window after Walter, Will sees her look back at the blanket on the chair, and the dusty bedspread.

He climbs out, himself, hastily shutting the window behind them. “I have a meeting at the university tomorrow,” he shares, keen to put it out of her mind.

It seems to work well enough. “Want a ride?” she offers.

“No. I’m going to walk into town first. I’ll catch a cab.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Oh, there’s one!” Molly nudges Walter and points.

Walter looks up from the miniature snowman he’s constructing. “Aw, I missed it!”

“Concentrate!” she teases.

“Hah! There!”

It starts to snow again around the time Molly and Walter are tied at six shooting stars each. All three of them tilt their heads back to catch snowflakes on their tongues.

Though they thin out and disappear towards the horizon, the patch of sky directly overhead is thick with dark grey clouds that obscure any astral activity that might be going on above them. Looking straight up muddles his depth perception and, to Will, as each flake comes close enough to see, it seems less like they are falling towards him, and more as though each growing speck has bloomed out of infinite darkness. For a few moments, he is filled with peace.

In the predawn grey, trudging through the shallow layer of snow that had settled over night, Will forces himself to parse out how he feels about having Molly and Walter here. He takes the long way into town, as he has several hours to kill, and more than a few sentiments to sort through.

Easiest to recognize, but far from the most pervasive, is the resentment he feels about the effort he’s making not to be his usual terse, misanthropic self. More than that, he’s terrified that he will, in one way or another, fail to censor himself, and upset Walter – either by letting something slip about the dark world he’s been inhabiting these past years, or simply by being his miserable self, awful to be around, and not the kind of personality a kid should have to deal with.

He’s not ungrateful. In fact, he’s selfishly thankful Molly had come back into his life. He feels a near suffocating guilt over the pockets of contentedness he’d allowed in the days since they had arrived, feeling equally guilty that he couldn’t make these times last longer.

Strangely, he is enjoying Walter’s hectic company, and is probably on – or at least approaching – the road to falling back in love with Molly. He’s sure he’ll fuck it up, and probably quickly.

Above all else, though, he is somehow lonelier than ever.


	4. Probably Could Have Managed a Thank You Note

The only explanation for comfort Will can recall having in a long time, is routine. What he feels now, before Molly and Walter have even been with him a week, is perilously close to comfort. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel like slipping into a routine with them. Molly and Will gravitate towards coffee together on the porch in the mornings, and he thinks maybe this is something they would have done if they’d had a porch in New Orleans. If they’d had time.

Unfortunately, part of the routine – whether he recognizes it as routine or not – is grappling with his bad arm every morning. It is healing so slowly; he can’t really tell if it’s healing at all. It is still grotesque, scar tissue forming unevenly at the edges, the length of the deeper wounds still scabbed over. He’s thankful for the cold weather that ensures long sleeves are required pretty much at all times.

However much he covers it up, though, it’s impossible to hide entirely that something is wrong. Every time he brings Molly coffee, he has the strange sensation that the nerves in his arm are burning out one by one, and, after handing it over, he has to make a fist a few times just to reassure himself that he hadn’t lost all function again. Molly doesn’t say anything, or even let on that she notices.

Walter, on the other hand, has no reason to suppress his curiosity. One day, while they are working on the boat, as they now do on most afternoons, Walter asks outright if he’d hurt his arm. The question catches Will off guard, drawing his attention to the fact that he’s hardly using his left hand at all. All he can think of to say is, “Sort of.”

The Saturday before school starts, Molly and Will are on the porch with coffee and parkas and toques when Walter opens the front door, still in his pajamas, to let the dogs out.

“Hey, it’s Mamamma’s birthday today,” Molly tells him. “Are you gonna call her?”

“I don’t know where your phone is.”

“Probably at the very bottom of my purse.”

“Use the land line,” Will suggests, as Molly puts her coffee aside and stands.

Walter looks from Molly to Will. “Is it okay if it’s long-distance?”

Will nods. “Don’t worry about it.” When Walter goes to find the phone, Will turns to Molly. “Jesus, that is one conscientious nine-year-old.”

“Isn’t he good?” Molly says fondly, looking after Walter.

“Who’s this _Mamamma_?”

“Wally’s grandma on his dad’s side.” A second later, she wrinkles her nose and shakes her head with a small breath of a laugh as she sits back down. “That’s – I mean, _obviously_ on his dad’s side.”

Will downs the rest of his coffee while he tries to think of a response, and only manages to come up with, “That’s a cute nickname.” He sighs afterwards, though it’s pretty much par for the course, and not much worse than what he’d managed at the time – which was nothing. He gets to his feet. “I’m going check the mailbox. Want to come?”

“Yeah.” Molly pulls on her gloves and pulls the zipper of her coat right up to her chin. She pokes her head back inside and yells, “Be back in a little bit! Say hi to Mamamma for me!”

It’s a ten-minute walk to the post box. They walk most of it in silence. At some point, Molly starts humming. “I have a confession,” she says after a while.

He raises his eyebrows at her.

“I kind of put this down as a forwarding address at the post office before I left.”

“How dare you.”

They both smile and watch the ground for a while.

“Some of this has got to be for you,” Will says when he opens the box. He closes it again and pockets the key before it can freeze in the lock.

“Fan mail from the electric company, no doubt. Hand ’em over.”

Will reads off the envelopes as he flips through the stack. “Molly Graham, Molly Graham, Molly Foster-Graham…”

“Yeah, remember how we never actually got divorced, ’cause it was expensive and neither of us wanted to do the paperwork?”

“That was never a problem for you? What about Walter’s father?”

She shrugs. “Never asked. I don’t like the way _Molly Landry_ sounds anyway. Was it ever a problem for you?”

“Total non-issue.”

“Yeah, right.” She smirks. “I bet you’re blissfully unaware of how many would-be Mrs. Grahams threw themselves at you over the years.”

He smirks right back. “Blissfully?”

“Ha ha. You’re right. That’s not how you do things.”

They are heading back when he finds himself saying, inexplicably, “I _was_ seeing someone.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Did you scare them off with your criminal intelligence?”

Will frowns at her glib use of the word _criminal_.

Immediately, Molly blushes and apologizes. “That was some poor word choice.”

Will shrugs. 

“Do you still talk to her?”

“It was a him, actually,” he clarifies, again having no idea why.

“Oh. I didn’t know you had any inclinations that way.”

“My inclinations are few and far between.” He shrugs again, hoping he hadn’t opened too big a can of worms. “Hard to make any generalizations when you can count the instances on one hand. Anyway, no.”

“Still pretty raw about it?”

“It wasn’t that long ago.”

“Wanna tell me about it?”

Will looks over at her and thinks, he probably could. Some of it, anyway. The stuff that didn’t involve him and this _person he’d been seeing_ being murderers. He bites the inside of his cheek and tells himself not to spoil this. “Not yet,” he says, both to her and to himself.

After lunch, Walter helps him make up some fresh dog food, then they go out to the shed once more while Molly draws herself a bath. When they return to the house, Molly is on the sofa with Walter’s book. She’d clearly picked up where he’d left off.

“Sorry, kid,” she says. “I think I lost your page.”

“ _Mom!_ ” Walter reaches out to grab the book back, but Molly holds it out of reach, appraising his filthy hands.

“Not with those hands, mister!”

“Right,” Will says. “I should probably teach you how to get all that engine grease off before dinner.”

Molly sticks her tongue out at Walter and pretends to go back to reading.

“You don’t even know what’s happening.”

“Sure I do. You caught me up just last night!”

Walter continues to grumble as he follows Will to the kitchen.

Molly calls after him. “What? It’s a good book!”

At dinner, Walter tells her, “Will says we’re almost done with the motor and we can start fixing up the boat tomorrow.”

“That’s great, sweetheart. Think you’ll be done before school starts?”

Walter looks at Will, and Will shrugs. “Depends how hard we work.”

“Not that there’s a deadline,” Molly says.

“Are you bored?” Will asks. “I know there’s not much to do around here…”

“Of course not! I’m never bored. You know that.”

“Yeah. I know. But I don’t think my ego could handle this being the first time.”

“Well, I’m not,” she pronounces.

“Not bored.”

“Nope.”

“Stressed?”

“A little. I’ll be earning again soon, though. At least enough so we can stay at a motel or something.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

She smiles at him.

“Unless you’re bored.”

He learns, then, that Molly doesn’t have a problem sticking her tongue out at _him_ , too.

After dinner, Walter makes a big deal about sighing and flipping back through his book to find the last page he’d read, and Molly teases, “Want me to tell you what happened?”

Walter gets through quite a bit more of the book over the next hour or so. Will replies to emails with no real sense of urgency. Molly sits on the floor and brushes the dogs’ coats. Will looks up from his screen at one point and sees Molly gazing at Walter pensively. Her elbow rests on the couch cushion as she scratches behind Winston’s ears. Little Zoe is in her lap. After a few moments, she feels his eyes on her and looks up at him. When their eyes meet, she smiles and winks, and looks a little less serious.

They take it easy on Sunday, all three of them having school in some form or another the next morning. In the evening, Will makes hot cocoa, and they drink it outside in the cold but clear night air. Molly and Will sit on the steps and throw sticks for the dogs. The dogs chase after them, and Walter chases after the dogs, running off the last of his frenetic energy before bed. Eventually, Walter’s whooping and dancing around becomes more exciting than the sticks, and the dogs don’t bother bringing them back to be thrown again.

Softer and quieter than usual, Molly says, “I’m happy for you. You did well for yourself.”

“So did you.” Will nods at Walter who, just that morning, rather than being disappointed that they weren’t going to paint, as planned, and pouting like he’d expect any nine-year-old to do, tidied up the work bench instead. “You’ve got a really great kid there.”

“I know. He’s the best kid.”

Molly turns her pretty eyes to him, and Will meets them. If ever eyes were windows to the soul, Molly’s were. They’re so familiar, it’s like travelling back in time, except there’s something else in her eyes, too. Something more. “You’re different now,” he says aloud, and hears surprise in his own voice.

“I’m a mom now.”

“A good mom.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell.”

Molly grins as Walter starts bounding towards the house, dogs and all. “I’m the _best_ mom… Right, baby?” she says, as he tramps past them up the stairs.

“What?”

“I’m the coolest mom ever.”

Walter rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Hey! Goodnight hug, please!” she demands.

“I gotta pee!” he answers, already on the move again.

Molly turns back to Will and needlessly points out, “He’s got the world’s tiniest bladder.”

The three of them sharing a bathroom, especially with Walter having the world’s tiniest bladder, means non-toilet activities are carried out with the door unlocked and often ajar. So, the next morning, it’s no surprise that Molly comes in to brush her teeth while Will is shaving. Their eyes meet in the mirror.

“Don’t look so guilty,” she teases. “I didn’t expect you to keep the razor. I wouldn’t have.”

“I did keep it, actually.”

Perhaps seeing his hesitation before he can register it, himself, she says, _Oh_ , like he’d already explained. Not for the first time, or even for the first time _today_ , he is grateful to Molly.

He finishes rinsing off the cheap cartridge razor and towels off, giving up on the idea of elaborating. Molly is intuitive enough to weigh the burden of not knowing against the burden of explanation, and to know when it’s not worth it. He manages a small smile, and, instead, says, “You look nice.” He leaves the bathroom before he can begin to feel stupid about it.

He walks into town again, and catches a bus to VCU, rather than taking a cab. He ends up being late to the meeting, having drastically miscalculated. He doesn’t recall public transit being so time consuming, but it had, upon reflection, been more than a little while.

Apparently, he hadn’t missed anything in the first part of the meeting, and the committee continue to accomplish nothing after he arrives. Since half the faculty had still been on vacation when they had their last meeting, this one ends up being mostly introductions and plans for future planning. The names of the collaborators and dates of meetings to come lodge themselves automatically in Will’s memory, but, unlike he normally is when people try to take up brain space with inconsequential information, he isn’t annoyed at anyone for putting them there. Maybe because Molly gave him a hug that morning.

“You can bring your stuff inside you know,” Will says that evening, when Molly goes out to her car, roots around in the trunk for a while, and hurries back to the house with another armful of clothes, stamping snow off her boots and shivering.

She dumps the clothes on the couch next to him. “It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t want you to get the impression that we’re planning to crash here forever.”

“I don’t get that impression at all. You were apartment hunting the day after you got here.”

Molly folds a few shirts in silence. “I was feeling guilty about coming here. I mean, looking back – you pretty obviously didn’t want to stay in touch.”

There is no denying that, except for the first couple years after their separation, the flow of Christmas cards and presents had been one way. “Sorry,” Will says.

“Oh please,” she replies airily. “You’re allowed to move on. I did.”

“I didn’t think there was any point,” he says honestly.

“I know. Look, I wouldn’t have sent that stuff if I didn’t want to.”

“I probably could have at least managed a thank you note.”

Molly laughs. “Probably.” Finished folding, she sits down between him and the pile of clothes.

“I’m glad you came here.”

“I should have thought it through, though. I mean, what if you were living with someone? How embarrassing would that have been?”

Will chuckles softly. “I think maybe you _did_ think it through and thought that wasn’t likely.”

“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to be hosting dinner parties or anything…” she teases.

Once again, he could end the conversation here. Molly isn’t asking. There’s nothing forcing him to say more, besides his own tongue’s desire to. Still, he finds himself saying, “If I could have been with anyone, I would have stayed with you, Molly.”

A pink tinge appears in her cheeks, and she starts playing with her fringe. “I guess I knew that,” she says, eventually. “Probably why I wanted to chase after you.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“For the same reason. Let’s not…” The corners of her mouth turn down and she looks away. A few moments later, she breaks the awkward silence by saying, brightly, “Luckily for you, I showed up here after all!”

“And I’m glad.” After some transient eye contact, Will starts playing with the sleeve of her sweater. Her arm is draped over the back of the couch and it’s tempting to just take her hand. It would be so easy. “It’s really good to see you.”

She starts picking at his sweater sleeve in return. Her eyes have teared up. “I guess we have like twelve years of stuff to catch up on.”

“Almost thirteen.”

She wipes her eyes with her other sleeve and lets out a small laugh. “Jesus, we’re old.”

“Sure feels that way,” he agrees. The desire to hold her – part of her, if not all of her – is becoming painful, and he yields. When he moves his hand to cover hers, it feels like two magnets slipping into place. “Molly, you can stay here as long as you want.”

“Are you sure?”

Will nods and gives her hand a quick squeeze.

She stands and piles up the folded clothes. With her arms full, she suddenly gives him a cheeky smile. “Hey – isn’t this house half mine, anyway? Since we’re still married.”

The next Monday, Molly drives Will into Richmond, despite it being ridiculously far out of her way. She insists that she wants to.

“Besides,” she says, “you’re only going to have these meetings twice a month from now on, right? It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s not a big deal for me to take the bus, either.”

“Well, it kind of is. Unless you’re _that_ different now.”

“I’m not that different. But–”

“You can handle it, now?”

Will nods, feeling relief flood through him.

“Sorry. Bad habit.”

Will shakes his head. Not long after they’d started dating, he found that Molly finishing his sentences triggered a sensation in him akin to letting out a deep breath after holding it underwater.

“I try not to do it – it’s annoying, I know.”

“Not to me.”

She smiles. “Yeah... you’re a weirdo, though.” A little while later, she tells him, “You have no idea how much I appreciate what you’re doing for Walter and me.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Molly.”

“I know.”

“You’re worried about something, though.”

“Not exactly. I just have doubts sometimes.”

“Parental doubts?”

She nods. “I just want to do what’s best for Walter.”

“You’re worried moving was a bad idea?”

“No. We needed to get a fresh start.”

“Didn’t think an ex-husband would help in that.”

“You can have a new start with old friends.” She glances over at him. “What are you chewing on, over there? Worried about me worrying?”

He smiles. “That obvious?”

“You have the worst poker face.”

“Or you just know how to read me.”

“I’m reading you reading me.”

“I’m making too much of this, aren’t I?”

“Yep,” she agrees. “I’m just having normal mom worries. Nothing’s wrong, Will.”

“Sorry. I tend to… catastrophize.”

“I know, babe. It’s part of your charm.” They pull into the main campus parking lot. “Want me to pick you up later?”

“No. I don’t know what time I’ll be done. I’ll make my own way home.”

“Okay. Call me if you change your mind.”

They both lean over without thinking about what they’d do once they reached the other. The result is an awkward half-hug and a bumping of faces that somewhat passes as a cheek kiss. Will gets out of the car and makes his way into the building, feeling flustered, and Molly drives away with her cheeks pink.

When he gets home that evening, Molly and Walter are playing Scrabble at the kitchen table.

Molly gives him a warm smile and nods her head at the stove. “We ate already. Yours is in the oven. You must be starving.”

“Thanks.” He extricates the plate from its tin foil casing and plucks a knife and fork from the drying rack. He hesitates, then tentatively brings his dinner over and joins them at the table.

“A man came by earlier asking for you,” Molly informs him at the end of her turn, while Walter counts up the points.

Will blanches. “Did you let him in?”

“Of course not. We were outside with the dogs, anyway. Why?”

At length, he manages, not to answer her question, but to ask another. “What did he want?”

“I don’t know. I asked if he wanted me to give you a message, but he said it wasn’t important.”

Will’s mouth is dry. He chews his food but feels if he swallows, he’ll choke on it. Two worlds he desperately wanted to keep far apart had collided, and he hadn’t been here to prevent it happening. He feels ill.

He must look it, too. Molly is frowning in concern. “You okay?” she asks softly.

“Sorry. I was… just thinking.”

“You can’t come here, Hannibal.”

“I promise you; I had no idea you had… house guests.”

“She’s my wife.” Will doesn’t elaborate.

For the first time ever, Hannibal hangs up on him.

Will feels sick when the line goes silent. Swallowing his pride and his chronically exigent need to hurt Hannibal in one way or another, he calls him back.

Hannibal answers right away, the veneer of self-composure all polished up again. “Forgive me, Will. That was incredibly rude of me.” He manages the perfect mixture of coolness and regret – somehow managing to sound appropriately self-chastising while, more than anything, reproachful of Will.

It works embarrassingly well. “We got married a long time ago,” Will explains, to his own annoyance. “I haven’t seen her in over ten years.” He’s entreating Hannibal – _Please, Hannibal. You know there’s no one but you. I promise._ He almost hangs up, himself, this time, because, in this moment, he has no idea what is going on. All he knows is that he sounds pathetic and feels equally so.

“You’re not obliged to clarify merely for my benefit.” Hannibal’s voice is equable and insincere.

“Good,” Will snaps, immediately done with placating him. “Don’t come here anymore.”

He can practically hear the person suit curling up at the edges even before Hannibal’s response. “I understand, Will. You, however, are always welcome in my home.”

Will is sure it’s not just him being attuned to the subtleties of Hannibal’s cadence and word choice. He’s sure anyone would agree that the statement was forced.


	5. A Half-Buried Grudge Against the Rich

The next morning, Will stands bleary-eyed in the kitchen, watching the coffee percolate. Before the pot is even half full, he avails himself of a mug.

Molly comes in as he’s pouring his second cup. “You okay?” she asks, helping herself to the remainder.

“Hm?”

“Last night. You got real pale.”

“Oh.”

“Was it him?”

“Who?”

“When I said someone came looking for you, you knew right away who it was.”

“Oh.” He puts his mug down on the counter and rubs both hands over his face. “Right.”

“So?”

“So, what?”

“So, are you okay?”

“Oh,” he says, for a third time. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

They take their coffees out onto the porch.

“In your own little world this morning,” Molly remarks.

“Sorry. Tired. Did he say anything to you?”

“Not really. He was very polite, and said he was sorry for disturbing us. I didn’t even get his name.”

Will’s sigh of relief is audible.

Molly frowns. “Why?”

Will can’t explain how wrong it is that Hannibal and Molly had come face to face. Not right now. Not without revealing everything. He settles for, “He’s not supposed to come around here.”

They are quiet for a long while.

Then, Molly says, quite out of the blue, “He shouldn’t have messed you around.”

Will looks at her, puzzled. “What makes you think he did?”

“The way you talk – or _don’t_ talk – about him. And you’re a sweet man. Someone could take advantage of that.”

“You are literally the only person who has _ever_ called me sweet. I sure as hell wasn’t sweet to him.”

“Bet you were.” She takes a sip of coffee. “In your own way. Should I tell him to get lost next time?”

“There’s not going to be a next time.”

After a week of Hannibal neither reappearing nor phoning, Will relaxes a little – against his better judgement, but out of his power. Relaxing, though, creates room in his chest into which loneliness expands once more. Alone during the day, Will combats it any way he can. He researches cold case files, historical murders, crimes he’d never touched, trying to get as far away from himself as possible. He pushes the wildlife encyclopedia back half an inch on the shelf, so it’s not noticeably out of place or missing, but is shadowed by the other books and doesn’t draw his eye so much. When his mind wanders, he often comes out of his reverie not knowing which life he’s in – the life before Abigail, or after – or who, if anyone, he’s expecting to come through the door. He goes back to reading until his head hurts, and he has an excuse to drink some whiskey and lie down.

Work is mostly effective in keeping his forts intact. Sometimes, it’s _too_ effective, and Will ends up ignoring the present, as well as the past. Molly might have gotten used to Will tuning out, but that was a lifetime ago, and he’s embarrassed whenever he realizes he’s done it again. Especially with Walter, who has no context in which to put Will’s behaviour. Surprisingly, however, another month passes before the inevitable happens.

“You boys are on your own for dinner tonight,” Molly says one morning in early March. “Softball tryouts after school.”

“Aren’t you trying out?” Will asks Walter.

“My school’s not doing that ’til next week. Mom and I are gonna practice this weekend probably.”

“Ready to go, kid?” Molly pulls on her boots and holds out Walter’s jacket.

“Bye, Will.”

“See you, kid,” Will replies, and dives head-first into a textbook.

He’s still working when Walter gets home. He falls asleep at some point and wakes up to the sound of the dogs begging. Walter is eating mac and cheese. When he sees Will is awake, he goes to the kitchen and brings him back a bowl, too.

Later that evening, when Molly gets in, she immediately notes something amiss. Walter is reading his book, but keeps glancing over at Will, who has just put away his laptop and has his eyes closed, shutting out the light that is exacerbating a headache he’d brought on himself.

Molly goes over to Walter and strokes his hair.

“Why do you look so serious, baby?”

“I feel bad. Hey, Will?”

“Yeah, kid. What’s up?”

“I’m really sorry.”

Will opens his eyes and looks at him with slight alarm. “What for?”

“For bugging you earlier?”

“Were you bugging me?”

“Seemed like it.”

“Oh, shit,” Will says.

“Hey,” Molly admonishes.

“Did I snap at you?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Sorry, no.”

“You didn’t snap, exactly.”

“What, then?”

“You just said _stop that_. I thought you were mad.”

Will recalls, then, what might as well have been fragments of a dream, they are so hazy. The thump of a rubber ball bouncing off the wall, the little kid’s voice repeatedly encouraging the dogs to _fetch_ , and the scrabbling of the dogs’ nails against the floor as they rush to obey.

Molly looks at Will, sees his cheeks burning with embarrassment, and rescues him. “Sometimes, when Will is concentrating really hard, he can be short,” she tells Walter. “It doesn’t mean he’s mad, sweetheart.”

“Sorry, kid. I know what I sound like.” Like he was talking to a room full of trainees who had just given him a standing ovation, probably. _Stop that_. He can hear himself.

Later, to Molly, he says again, “Sorry I was short with him.”

“Now that he knows, it’ll be water off a duck’s back. Don’t worry. What were you concentrating so hard on, anyway?”

“It’s more what I was trying _not_ to concentrate on.”

Molly and Walter are baseball people, Will finds out on the weekend. He sits outside on the porch Saturday morning, watching them play catch, which evolves into Molly pitching and Walter batting. It doesn’t matter whether Walter hits or misses, because there’s always at least one dog ready to go bounding after the ball, whatever direction it goes. The better Walter gets, the more the game becomes a game of fetch for the dogs.

“Want in, Will?” Molly calls over to him after a while.

Will shakes his head emphatically. Along with lazing out of his arm exercises, he also hasn’t been wearing the eyepatch, and has no idea how his aim would be when tested. He probably shouldn’t test it lobbing projectiles at a small child.

Instead, he goes inside and digs out what remains of his fly-tying materials. He arranges them on his desk and polishes the magnifying glass. He figures, if he doesn’t enjoy this the way he used to, maybe frustration would spur him to actually _work_ towards regaining some dexterity in the hand that oscillates between being an inconvenience and an impediment. _Useless_ would be an improvement. He’d settle for going back to that.

Molly goes grocery shopping the next day and, when she asks if he has any requests, Will absently tells her to take his credit card.

“You sure?” she asks, but Will is deep into a forensics textbook and doesn’t answer.

When she gets home, she is laden with more than just groceries. She dumps a pile of clothes on the armchair and yells for Walter. “Tommy grew out of a bunch of stuff – come check it out.”

Will can’t help but watch as they go through the pile – and not just because they are occupying the space directly across from him while they do it. Their method is somehow both haphazard and organized.

“Hey, look!” Walter holds up a Spider-Man t-shirt.

They continue rifling through the pile, and Molly finds three more super-hero shirts. “Aw, these are so cool!”

“Tommy said _I_ could have them?”

“Yep.”

“I’m gonna wear this one tomorrow,” he decides.

She folds all the clothes that meet approval, setting aside two pairs of pants for hemming.

When Walter runs outside to play, Will asks, “Does he ever get bullied?”

He’s sure that’s too much of a non-sequitur, even for him, but Molly says, “Because he’s small? He used to.” She disappears for a minute and comes back with an old biscuit tin crammed with sewing supplies. “I _was_ worried he was going to have to go through that all again here.”

“He’s not, though?” Will asks, as she gets out a pin cushion and starts tailoring Walter’s new pants. “Going through all that?”

Molly shakes her head. She looks at him thoughtfully for a moment, then asks, “What was your first impression of Walter?”

“That he has enough energy to power the town?”

She giggles. “Sure. But, I mean, when you first opened the door?”

“Friendly. Happy.”

“Exactly. I’m pretty sure the kids at his new school figured he’d be more fun to play with than pick on.”

“The kids at his _old_ school didn’t figure that?”

“They did, it just took them a few months to work it out.” She frowns slightly, maybe deciding how deep a conversation this should be, then shrugs. “The kids at his new school don’t know anything about him except what he wants them to know. No small-town gossip. And Walter has a healthy attitude about his size. It’s hard to bully someone like that.”

“And the hand-me-downs?”

“Walter has a healthy attitude about that, too.”

“Seems Walter has a healthy attitude about everything.” He is thinking of his own childhood psyche – how it could have benefitted from having a healthier attitude, or even being _around_ a healthy attitude – and doesn’t notice how sarcastic he sounds.

Molly is quiet for almost a full minute, ostensibly concentrating on threading a needle. She could do that with her eyes shut, though, and eventually, her silence clues him in. Clearly, his _adult_ psyche could do with an attitude overhaul, too.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he mumbles. He used to wonder sometimes, when things were going okay, how much of the animosity he felt towards Hannibal was just a half-buried grudge against the rich. A shamefully large percentage, is the conclusion he usually came to. Apologetically, he adds, “You know I’ve got a thing about rich people.”

Molly’s mouth quirks up. “I had no idea!” She starts stitching, and tells him, “Tommy’s family aren’t rich. And we’re not poor. Not really.”

“You make it all look easy. Both of you. Being okay with everything.”

“It hasn’t always been like this. It’s hard to find balance. He’s a smart kid, and I haven’t always been able to shelter him.”

“Nor should you?”

“I know. I don’t want to raise one of those nightmare kids, too pampered to deal with the real world when they grow up.”

Will grins. “ _Molly_ coddled?”

Molly grins back and throws a scrap of pant leg at him. She nods at the window, through which they can see Walter running this way and that, the pack of dogs rushing after him, eager, and not caring that their zigzagging has no purpose. “The kid loves life too much to let anything get him down much.”

“Like what?”

“Like… um…” She lifts one shoulder and wrinkles her nose, apparently reluctant to give an example. It’s clear, a moment later, why. “Like, Walter just started at his new school when his dad got arrested.”

“Arrested?”

Molly waves her hand to signal that it’s a story for another time. “Point being that he’s had his share of hardship. He knows that not being able to afford new clothes every six months doesn’t really matter.”

“Smart kid.” A smart kid who doesn’t think life is always going to be sunshine and rainbows, but who is excited about it every day anyway. “How does he do it? How do you do it?”

She looks up from her sewing, fixing him with her lovely eyes. She is smiling, but not joking when she says, “Being happy takes practice.”

Supplementing what feels like a crash course in parenting, Will soon witnesses some of the tough love he’d elected to forget Molly was capable of showing.

Wednesday night, dinner is tense. Molly is clearly angry about something, and Walter isn’t his usual chatty self. As soon as his plate is clear, she says to him, sharply, “Bed. Now.”

She and Will pick half-heartedly at some leftover blackberry rhubarb pie, then Molly says she’ll clean up, and he leaves her to take out some of her frustration on the dishes. When she joins him in the living room, it’s apparent that she doesn’t want to talk about it, so Will engrosses himself in some fly-tying practice while she marks spelling tests across the room.

An hour or so later, Walter comes in in his pajamas and timidly says, “Mom?” He edges towards her and she puts aside the stack of book reports she’s now reading and holds out her hand. “I’m sorry I lied.”

“You know why I’m mad, right?”

He sits down next to her and leans against her side.

“When good people lie, they do it for a really good reason. Like, they have to, to protect someone.”

Walter nods. 

“And you don’t have to lie to me, because we protect each other, right?”

He nods again. “I’m sorry, Mom.” 

“Okay, baby. Give me a hug.” She kisses the top of his head. “I saved you a piece of pie. You can have it tomorrow.” 

He nods into her shoulder. 

“Go back to bed, now. I love you more than anything.”

“Love you too, Mom. ’Night, Will.”

“’Night, kid.” Will steals a glance at them. When Walter pauses in the doorway and looks over his shoulder at her, Molly smiles at him. A warm, honest smile, letting him know he’s forgiven completely.

He remembers how that forgiveness feels, though he doesn’t think he’s ever outright lied to Molly. This time around, though, lies of omission have been necessary, and regular. It feels as bad as lying, and he wishes she knew, so she could forgive him.

A little while later, Molly goes for a walk, and it’s clear she wants to go alone. She didn’t often need time to herself, but, every so often, she’d take a few hours to think her thoughts, and feel her feelings, and _recharge_ , as she put it. She takes Winston with her, along with the hefty torch Will keeps by the back door.

“Be safe,” he says, though he knows she will be. It’s a poor excuse to say something so she won’t go just yet. He doesn’t know why, until she gives him a smile, and he realizes how badly he wants to kiss her. 

“Back in a little bit.” She pulls on her mittens and blows him a kiss, and he wishes it was something he could actually catch and hold.

Will watches her go and wonders why love is now something that has to hurt. It hadn’t hurt before. It never hurt with _her_ until they decided to part ways. Maybe he assumed he could never love anyone as much as he loved her.

And, maybe, he’d sabotaged everything since because, deep down, he really just wanted to go back to Molly.


	6. Knew You'd Look Smashing

Spring arrives, and softball season begins. Will is alone for longer during the day. When Walter doesn’t have practice, he goes to his friend Tommy’s after school, and Molly picks him up when she’s done coaching. Making sure there’s dinner ready for them gives Will something to do with the latter half of his afternoon, after the ripping headaches subside and he doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

Spring is also apparently the time for class projects and school events. Molly spends her evenings cutting brightly coloured construction paper into a variety of shapes, or choosing songs for her students to sing at parent-teacher night.

On one such evening, after Walter goes to bed, the two of them sit together in the living room – Will at his desk, dismantling a particularly sloppy lure into its constituent parts; Molly on the floor, strumming her guitar and humming quietly, artlessly giving him her less perfect profile.

Will had forgotten how much he loved finding Molly in various guileless attitudes. Eventually feeling his eyes on her, she’d look up to find him staring, bat her eyelashes a few times, smirk playfully, then blow him a kiss and go back to whatever she was doing. He loved the complete lack of calculation.

Suddenly, Will blurts out, “You’re so pretty, Molly.”

Molly looks up, startled. Rarely flustered, though, she smiles cheekily and replies, “Aren’t I, though?” Still, a bit of colour appears in her cheeks, and she keeps smiling even when she goes back to strumming and humming.

One Friday, Walter comes home carrying a cardboard box almost as big as himself. It’s full of chocolates to sell to raise money for their class camping trip – _outdoor education_ , as they were supposed to call it.

Molly had already declined to chaperone her school’s trip in two weeks’ time, even though Will offered to give her the money.

“I could use a break,” she told him. “They’ll be gone a whole week, and I’ve got all the outdoors I need here.”

Today, Walter is home well before Molly, thanks to a professional development afternoon. Without preamble, he asks Will, with age-appropriate curiosity and innocence, “Do you still love Mom?”

It’s purely conversational, and it twists Will’s stomach into knots. “Of course I do,” he says, hoping desperately that this is an okay thing to say. He clears his throat and gives Walter a small smile. “Have you ever met a single person who _doesn’t_ love your mom?”

“One.” Walter breezes right past this to say, “You guys seemed real happy.”

“What do you mean?”

Walter goes to the bedroom and returns with an old album so full of photos, the whole thing looks like it’s trying to escape its spine.

Molly was keen on documentation, always saying that she’d scrapbook, but she’d probably get carried away. Will thinks of the tissue-paper flowers she’d spent last night stringing into garlands for the school recital.

Walter flips through the album quickly to get to the chunk of it verifying Molly and Will’s beach wedding and their first year of marriage. Most of the photos include Molly pulling silly faces, and himself looking ridiculously happy.

It brings to the surface memories he’d scarcely allowed himself to admit were there. Though he knows it couldn’t have been sunny all the time, each memory is bathed in bright sunlight – sometimes morning sunlight, creeping across the floor of the leaky little condo they rented when they first moved to the city so Will could attend the police academy; sometimes the kind of sunlight that, itself, felt damp, because it was so hot, they were sweating out of every pore by noon; but, mostly, late-afternoon sunlight, throwing beams of warm colour across the sky as the sun set.

When Molly gets in, she suggests to Walter that they go help out at Evelyn’s shop. “She might let you and Tommy put some chocolate out by the cash register.”

“Can I sleep over?”

“If you’re invited, sure.”

Evidently, he is, and, when Molly returns later, solo, she seeks out Will’s company. “You want a drink?” she offers.

“Sure.”

They go into the kitchen and Molly reaches up to grab the whiskey from the top shelf of the cabinet over the stove. She pauses with the bottle at eye level, then slowly lowers it to the counter, frowning. 

Will waits for her to say something. She is flushed all of a sudden and certainly looks like she wants to.

Instead, she gets out two glasses and pours them each a healthy amount. When she hands him a glass, she’s no longer frowning. “Just tell me you have it under control.”

Will nods. He tells himself it’s true – sometimes.

“Well, then, cheers.”

They take their drinks to the living room and settle on the couch. Will is suddenly aware of how quiet it is without Walter around. When he’s on his own, it doesn’t even register. Will _plus_ Molly _plus_ quiet, though? Those are terms from another life. He remembers that, just as Walter does now, Molly, too, used to have two distinct settings. Hers were, vibrant and social, and driven to activity; and mellow and pensive, and, well, cuddly.

Clearly thinking along the same lines, Molly says, “You don’t realize how much noise pollution you deal with ’til you come to a place like this… You know, it’s even nice not having a TV.”

“I didn’t even think of that,” Will says and scratches at his stubble, somewhat embarrassed. “You sure you’re not bored yet?”

Molly shakes her head and smiles. “Walter hasn’t mentioned missing it, either.”

“I guess we survived alright without TV growing up.”

“I would’ve loved to grow up here. There’s so much space!”

Will nods and takes a sip of whiskey. “Yeah, there’s no shortage of that.”

Molly gives him a funny look.

Will shrugs and looks away, not sure why he’d said it so glumly.

“Hey,” she says, sternly, reaching her foot over to nudge his knee. “You know you’re doing more than enough for us here, right?”

He nods again, with a smile this time, to dispel her worries. He _has_ to get better at hiding his melancholy. He won’t be able to forgive himself if he lets it prematurely sour this second chance at a friendship with the best person he’d ever known.

Molly verbalizes the sentiment again, even more firm. “ _More_ than enough.”

Perhaps she did this thinking that time would have eroded their capacity for unspoken understanding – but Will can’t remember there ever being a time when Molly hadn’t made him feel he was doing enough. Even when her parents died, and all Will could do was hold her while she cried, that had been enough. _He_ had been enough – and it was baffling.

For the entirety of their relationship, Will had found her interest in him largely inexplicable, and he certainly hadn’t come to any grand realizations in the years since. After swallowing some more whiskey, he asks, point blank, “Why’d you pick me, Molly? You could’ve had anyone.”

“I dunno,” Molly answers airily. “Maybe because you were the new guy.”

He raises his eyebrows, genuinely surprised. “Wouldn’t have thought that an asset.”

“New is exciting. And you were angsty.” She goes on to divulge, in a conspiratorial tone, “Teenage girls love a real angsty boy if he’s handsome.”

“Angsty… Christ.”

“Not accurate?”

“ _Too_ accurate.” After a while, he ventures further. “Why’d you agree to marry me? After all my angsty charm wore off?”

“Because I was in love, you idiot.” She kicks him playfully. “You were a good boyfriend, you know. Wasn’t crazy to think you’d be a good husband. You can stop asking dumb questions now.” She finishes off her drink, then adds with a touch of mischief, “Plus, you’d just got accepted into the academy, and I knew you’d look smashing in your uniform.”

The following Monday, Will returns home set on doing some menial task to take his mind off the now fairly routine frustrations of having to collaborate with other faculty members. He feeds the dogs and makes coffee for himself and Molly, then goes to laundry room. However, there is no sign of the hamper where he’d left it that morning.

He finds it in his bedroom, empty, and goes to the chest of drawers, anticipating the stress of having to refold everything without hurting Molly’s feelings. There’s no need.

He tries to call out to her, but his voice is hoarse all of a sudden. He goes back to the living room, where Molly is commenting on journals, taking time to write a little something in each student’s notebook.

Molly pauses, resting her elbow on her knee, chin cupped in hand, and notices him loitering in the doorway. “Hey babe. Whatcha up to?”

Will goes to her and hugs her tightly. Over her shoulder, he sees her neat printing standing out against childish scrawls on several of the open journals. _Great story! Tell me more next time! Good work! Watch your spelling!_ She draws a happy face next to all the comments.

He lets go of her as soon as her grip slackens, afraid of scaring her away with the sudden intensity. Lamely, he explains, “You folded my laundry.”

“You made me coffee,” she points out.

“You remembered how I like it.”

“I remember how you _need_ it,” she counters. “ _You_ remembered how I like it.”

He swallows, and manages, “Thanks.”

Molly studies him for a long moment. Will notices her eyes are more grey than green today. Her voice is gentle when she says, “You’ve been alone a long time, huh?”

He nods, because, in a way, he had been. In the way she meant.

Will knows there’s no way to fully escape the hold Hannibal has on him. They’re conjoined. Alone and not alone. But, for all their connectedness, they’d gone without the little things that meant you could build a life with someone. There was nothing ordinary for them. No mundane obstacles that money or murder couldn’t make go away. _Nothing human_ , he thinks, with an internal shiver.

Except Abigail. Abigail had humanized them. And she was gone.

As he muddles through these thoughts, Molly takes his hand and squeezes it, and it’s as though she’s endowing him with a little bit of her own stability. He remembers her doing the same thing twelve years ago, pushing past her anguish and working up a smile for him before she drove away from the airport terminal.

He remembers he had to whisper his goodbye, so he wouldn’t be sick at the very thought that he was about to lose her forever.

Now, Molly reaches out her other hand and rests it against his cheek, and, before the idea is even fully formed in his mind, he is saying it aloud.

“If I’d let myself miss you, I think I would have died.”


	7. Will Graham, Actual Puppy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains spoilers for His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman.

Not long after Will’s spontaneous admission to Molly, their slow-advancing friendship kicks up a notch.

The season has fully turned. Though it’s still cold out in the night air, there is no more need for space heaters indoors. Many of the fleecy blankets are retired to the linen cupboard, too.

Molly and Will are relaxing in the living room. Molly is cuddled up on the couch with one of the two remaining blankets, using it more as a pillow than a cover, reading a novel. Will is leaning back in the armchair, resting his eyes after a rather punishing meta-analysis in the March issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

Inevitably, Walter bounces into the room about an hour before bedtime and announces, “I’m gonna take the dogs out.” He already has three of them in tow.

“Okay, kid,” Molly says, sitting up and rearranging her blanket-pillow before lying back down again.

Walter calls the rest of the dogs each by name, patting his thigh. “Come on guys!” They leap up from their places by the hearth at his infectious enthusiasm and parade out after him.

The room is quiet again in the wake of their noisy exit. Will dozes a little but rouses himself when he notices the regular quiet sniffling coming from Molly’s direction.

“Are you crying?” he asks sleepily.

She answers by grabbing a handful of tissues from the box on the coffee table and blowing her nose. “I just finished this stupid book,” she says, wiping her eyes with one hand and holding up _The Amber Spyglass_ with the other. “I was going to give Walter the trilogy for his birthday, but I wanted to read it first. This is the last book.”

“And you’re crying because… it’s really bad?”

“I’m crying _because_ … the main characters…” She waves her hand and shakes her head, unable to continue for a moment. “Okay, so they’re from different universes,” she manages after letting loose a few little sobs. “But they meet, and go on adventures and stuff, and realize they’re soulmates…”

“Doesn’t sound _that_ awful.”

“They don’t end up together!” she practically wails.

“Well, why the hell not? Aren’t kid’s books supposed to have happy endings?”

“It’s a young adult book, apparently.”

“So… what? They couldn’t pick a universe to settle down in?”

“Basically.” She throws a dirty look at the offending work of fiction lying next to her. “Neither can _survive_ in the other one’s universe. That’s an _actual_ plot point.” She throws her hands up in the air and flops them back down again. “I mean, _what_?!”

“Sounds like grown up adult nonsense. You sure it’s meant for _young_ ones?”

“I’m not sure of anything right now. Except, there’s no way I’m letting Wally read this. It’ll break his little heart!” She mimes hurling the book into the fire before setting it on the coffee table and taking another tissue.

Will chuckles, unable to keep a smile off his face. “Dear, sweet Molly.”

Molly blows her nose again, loudly.

Walter clatters through the door with the dogs then, and, a few moments later, he appears in the living room, cheeks rosy and nose runny from the cold. When he sees Molly’s matching runny nose, and her puffy eyes, he folds his arms and groans.

“Mom, are you reading sappy stuff again?”

Will folds his arms just like Walter. “Is she always like this?” he asks conspiratorially.

Walter rolls his eyes. “She’s so _emotional_!”

Molly laughs around a hiccup. “Get over here and give your mother a cuddle, you little brat. You’re so mean to me!”

He flops down on the couch beside her, grinning impishly as she squeezes him.

She kisses and pats his head and says, “You’re grounded forever.”

Will goes to the bathroom and comes back to find Walter has wheedled the tearful Molly into a game of checkers. They are sprawled out on the floor by the hearth, with all the dogs in similar attitudes around them. The tranquil happiness the sight fills him with is the same he’d felt the first day he came home from work to find Abigail on the porch, reading and throwing sticks for the dogs. He has successfully repressed any thoughts of Abigail for weeks now, however, so he is left feeling nostalgic for he doesn’t know what.

But Abigail won’t be ignored. She visits him in his dreams that night, pale and ghostlike in a hospital gown, bandage around her neck and eyes sad.

 _Stop lying, Will_ , she says.

Will winces.

_You just keep lying._

She raises a hand, and he expects a cold slap, but what he feels, instead, are warm fingers stroking his cheek.

“Hey, hotshot. Wake up.”

Will opens his eyes. Molly is sitting on the arm of the chair.

“Why don’t you come and sleep downstairs?”

Will rubs his eyes with his fingertips. “I’m alright.”

Molly runs her nails through his hair, scratching his scalp lightly. It feels nice, and he leans into her touch. “Oh hi, puppy,” she chortles. Then she asks, almost timidly, “Have you just been sleeping in a chair all this time?”

“Sort of,” he admits.

She strokes his hair a little while longer. “Might as well come downstairs, then, don’t you think?”

Will visibly hesitates.

“You don’t have to tell me why you’re not sleeping in your bed if you don’t want to,” she offers.

“You think I’m nuts.”

She grins. “Sort of.” Then, as the grin fades, she shrugs and says, “I don’t need to know. Come on downstairs.”

In the dark, Will grabs his sweater and surreptitiously drapes it over his bad arm before they step out onto the landing.

Walter is fast asleep on the far side of the bed. As Molly slides under the covers and Will follows, he’s reminded of how it was growing up in the string of poor fishing villages and rundown trailer parks between major cities in Mississippi. Being poor meant that if you wanted to sleep on a mattress, you’d take whatever piece of it you could get. Nobody thought anything of having to share a bed with one, two, or even three other people.

Will never had his own bed. When he grew enough that being crowded against the wall, and subsequently waking up with a stiff neck and cramped legs, no longer balanced with sleeping on something soft, he started crashing on the sofa that was all lumps and springs instead. Eventually, his father moved the TV – something he simply stared at more than an actual means of entertainment – into the bedroom, and Will’s clothes out into the living room. It hardly mattered to Will. They’d move again in a few months anyway.

Molly, her sister, and her brother had all shared a bed. It was one of the few reasons Will could claim any sort of risqué behaviour in his youth: he and Molly had to have sex outside, or break into one of the boathouses, or bring extra clothes to pile on the docks so the slats didn’t dig into their backs. They got very good at having sex standing up, behind the school, in a supply closet, in the nooks between two buildings. He doesn’t know when he started expecting privacy.

“You were always private,” Molly murmurs sleepily, and Will realizes he’d said as much out loud. “You were always private with your thoughts.”

Her breaths become slow and deep, and he imagines waves lapping the sand at Biloxi, where the two of them had snuck through the Hard Rock construction site onto the private beach to sleep under the stars.

He drifts off with the newly remembered comfort of her warm body next to him.

Memory becomes dream seamlessly. Molly has fallen asleep against his chest, and Hannibal lies next to him, describing the beach as it would look in the not-so-distant future.

“This all gets blown away mere months from now,” he says conversationally. He might be describing the history of some ancient ruins, for all the humanity he exudes. He is as detached as ever. Separate. Other. Thousands of years or thousands of worlds away. “People will call it an act of God. They will rebuild, but…” He pauses dramatically and turns to face Will, eyes bright and unblinking. “It will not be the same.”

Over the top of Molly’s head, Will reproaches Hannibal for using such an obvious metaphor. He closes his eyes and tries to focus once more on the lulling sound of Molly’s breathing. Into the darkness behind his closed eyes, he adds, “And stay out of my memories.”

In the morning, Will goes to stretch his aching limbs and finds he doesn’t have to, because they don’t ache. The air feels full, and, after a moment or two of orienting himself, his senses confirm that it is, indeed – full of the smell of pancakes and bacon, and the sounds of classic rock. He follows these to the kitchen, pulling his sweater on along the way, hoping his mangled arm hadn’t been spotted by the early risers.

The record player is open on the table, blaring Tom Petty. He can’t remember the last time he’d listened to anything that wasn’t operatic or symphonic. No doubt one of the side-effects of blurring with Hannibal. Walter is sitting on the countertop playing frenzied air guitar, and Molly is singing away and keeping time with a spatula, waiting for some pancakes to brown.

“Do you mind?” she asks breathlessly, when Will appears. “I didn’t think you’d mind – it was covered in like six inches of dust…”

He leans against the door frame, a little uncomfortable in the face of such high spirits. “It’s… good,” he says. He finds he is already smiling at her.

“Join us!” she coaxes as she turns back to the stove and flips the pancakes over. A sizeable stack is already on a nearby plate.

“No way.”

She brandishes a whisk coated in whipped cream at him, and, when he refuses to lick it, plonks him on the nose with it. “Not such a rebel after all I guess?”

“Guess not.” He wipes the whipped cream off his nose and flicks it at her. It lands on the dimple in her cheek.

When the food is ready and they are sitting down, Molly pats Will on the arm and says, “It’s nice seeing you smile more.”

Will blushes and unfolds the day’s paper. He’s still not sure what to talk about when they congregate for a meal like this. Hiding behind a newspaper never helps the way he hopes it will, though. When he filters out everything he doesn’t want to see, there isn’t much left to read. He skips the front page entirely, flicking through the rest of it and quickly coming to the end. There are the classifieds and the personals – and he doesn’t really want to look at those either. They leave too much space for his mind to wander, and to wonder what is on the previous pages.

“Are you ever going to tell us what happened to your head there?” Molly asks.

“Surgery,” he answers absently.

“You got real talkative over the years, huh?”

He frowns at her, but it doesn’t stick. He sighs. “I had a stroke.” His eyes return to the paper, as though it might yield new material, but, after a moment or two of silence, he offers, “You can go ahead and say _I told you so_.”

“Oh!” she exclaims in sympathy, and then starts laughing. She leans across the table and places a hand on each of his cheeks. When he looks up at her, she makes her face solemn and says, slowly and seriously, “I told you so.” Her eyes twinkle at him. And his twinkle back at her, though he rolls them hard and shoves her hands away.

Molly’s thumbs each leave behind a blob of whipped cream, which Will doesn’t notice until bedtime.

Walter sleeps on the couch that night.

When she has settled Wally on the couch, content as anything to be surrounded by his canine brethren, Molly joins Will in the bathroom and they brush their teeth together, grinning at each other in the mirror.

Back in Will’s room, they lie face-to-face, heads pillowed on their arms, elbows touching. Molly takes his free hand in hers and laces their fingers together.

They talk for hours, first with Molly’s head on Will’s chest, then Will’s head in her lap, then taking turns spooning one another. At some point, Molly announces she’s cold, and they take a moment to snuggle under the covers. Their conversation continues. He can’t remember the last time talking came so easily. And Molly’s voice is the loveliest, funniest, sweetest voice in the world. Never, in all the years following their separation, had Will allowed himself to imagine talking with her. It hurt too much.

They reminisce about _that time in senior year_ , and the Tom Petty concert they were able to go to by getting cheap tickets last-minute off a scalper. They get around to catching up, eventually, and Will momentarily dreads having nothing he could stand to tell her. But, somehow, she manages to get stories from him he didn’t even realize were there. There _were_ times in the past decade that his existence didn’t seem either pointless or overly consequential, and she trawls for all of them. She demands to hear the adoption stories of each of the dogs. She asks him what his students at Quantico were like. He asks her how life in New Orleans turned out. She answers in French. And, before they know it, the sky is lightening, and they can hear the dogs stirring in the other room.

Molly yawns wide, then scoots down a little in the bed so the covers are up to her chin. Turning on her side, she slides her hand up his arm then down his chest to rest on his stomach. “That was nice,” she says sleepily. “Good talk.”

Will pulls her hand up to his lips so he can kiss it, then holds it to him and nuzzles his face into her hair. “Good night, Molly,” he whispers, as the dawn breaks.

“Good night, sweet man.”


	8. The 90's Swing Revival Was Way Too Much Fun

The turntable remains in the kitchen, almost always open and playing when Molly and Walter are home. Leafing through the records stacked next to it one day, Will asks, “Are these mine or did you bring them?”

“Both,” Molly answers slyly. “They _used_ to be yours, but you abandoned them! So, mine now.”

“That’s fair.”

“I guess they wouldn’t have fit in the _one_ suitcase you took.”

Will chuckles and protests, “I had a backpack, too.”

He puts on _The Rhythm of the Saints_ , and consents to twirl Molly a couple times. He’s thankful that Walter comes in before she can force him to participate any more. “Save me,” he begs. “Dance with your mom.”

He’d be self-conscious, to say the least, if _anyone_ ever found out how much fun he and Molly had participating in the 90’s swing revival. In this moment, he tries not to think about how hard Abigail in particular would have laughed.

A few days before Walter’s birthday, Molly gets a phone call early in the morning. Will comes into the kitchen to find her in animated conversation, leaning against the kitchen sink with the empty coffee pot in her hand, waving it absently.

He goes to her and gives her a kiss on the cheek, taking the forgotten coffee pot from her and gently nudging her out of the way to fill it up with water.

 _Sorry_ , she mouths.

With the coffee already ground up and the filter in the machine, there is a fresh pot by the time Walter joins them for breakfast. Molly says _goodbye_ to whomever is on the other end of the line, promising to call them back shortly. “Hey, kid,” she says. “That was Mamamma. Want to spend your birthday at the ranch?”

“Yeah yeah yeah!”

She giggles. “I thought so.”

“Are you guys coming?”

“No, sweetie, just you.”

“Too expensive?”

Molly puts a finger to her lips in a shushing motion. “Gampy will buy your ticket if you want to go. They have a surprise for you.”

“Yeah!” Walter actually jumps up and down. “I know what it is!” Before they can ask, Walter tears out of the room, and moments later the front door slams open as he goes to run off some of his excited energy before school.

“If–” Will begins.

“Don’t,” Molly interrupts. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“You’re going to say, _don’t worry about money if you want to go with Wally_.”

“Well, do you?”

Molly wrinkles her nose thoughtfully. “I don’t know… I wouldn’t mind some alone time, actually.”

Will grins. “Want _me_ to go with Wally?”

She laughs. “You know what I mean.”

He loops his arms around her waist and pulls her close. Nose-to-nose with her, he teases, “Alone time with _me_?”

She shoves him away playfully. “Well, not anymore!”

It turns out that neither of them knows what to do with their semi-alone time. Glancing touches and kisses on the cheek are easy enough when the busyness of everyday life only allows tidbits of affection. Though they’d had evenings together, it wasn’t enough time to explore what physicality could be like for them now, and both of them knew it, so neither of them tried. Now, they are faced with two whole days to themselves, and no reason to avoid it any longer.

Will tries, though. Not because he doesn’t want to touch Molly, but because his forts suddenly feel precariously propped up on rickety salt-splashed stilts, and he knows that if they succumb to the crashing waves, he’ll drown, too. Molly returns from dropping Walter at the airport appearing as uncertain as he’s ever known her to be. He uses her uncertainty to kid himself for the whole morning that he’d talk if he were sure _she_ wanted him to.

All day, in fact, he passes up opportunities to speak. When he brings her coffee, or she asks if he wants lunch, or she pauses for a few minutes between finishing a chapter in her book and tidying up her and Walter’s room, clearly amenable to having a discussion – he always waits a moment too long, and the opportunity becomes stale, or passes entirely.

The more time that elapses, the more remote Molly seems. Though they chitchat amicably, by mid-afternoon, it’s clear to Will that her feelings are hurt.

“I think I’ll go exploring,” she tells him. “Anywhere out of bounds?”

Will shakes his head, though _the stream_ nearly flies off his tongue.

“Any suggestions?”

He clears his throat and forces himself to stop assigning Abigail territory. “There’s a stream. There’s a nice little spot if you follow the path from the back door.”

“Okay,” she says, and, after the moment in which he might offer to show her passes without him doing so, “Back in a little bit.” Not letting any disappointment in him show, she blows him a kiss, as usual.

When he hears the back door close, the panic that he should have expected, but didn’t, comes at him so fast, he practically doubles over. It slogs him in the stomach, and it takes him the next five minutes to catch his breath. It takes him fifteen more to be able to stand and go start dinner. The panic doesn’t subside, though. It just retreats back into his head and fills his ears with a low buzzing.

They wash the dishes together after dinner. Molly flicks some dishwater at him and asks if he’s okay. He splashes her back in response, and smiles, despite his heart beating too fast and the buzzing intensifying.

Later on, Molly changes into pajama pants and a tank top. She looks so ordinary and lovely, Will suddenly wonders if he isn’t afraid to touch her in case she turns into Margot, a flawless but tragic Klimt. Or, what if the cotton transformed into silk, and she became someone else entirely?

Finally, Molly asks him if he’s tired, and announces that _she_ is, and she’s going to bed. She’d always been braver than Will. She demonstrates this again when, despite the evident possibility of being snubbed, she offers, “Do you want to sleep with me tonight?”

Wordlessly, and pitifully relieved, Will nods.

He brushes his teeth and douses his face in cold water before joining her.

“What’s the matter?” she asks when he crawls under the covers.

His throat aches already, and he feels tears pricking the corner of his eyes. He turns out the bedside lamp, but the moon is full and bright, and its light manages to seep through the curtains. There wouldn’t be any real hiding if he fell apart now. He makes himself speak anyway. “I’m not ready to lose you again.”

She leans up on her elbow and studies him in the semi-dark. “What are you talking about, Will?” she asks gently. “I’m right here.”

“I want to kiss you.”

Still puzzled, she says, “You can kiss me.” When he’s silent, she lays her head back down and suggests, “Want to cuddle again?”

He answers by shifting to take her in his arms.

She settles against him, and whispers into his neck. “You’re always afraid you’ll spoil things. But this is fine. This is nice.”

“Enough?” he mumbles into her hair.

“Mhm,” she affirms, adding, “You know, my sex drive isn’t what it used to be, either.”

“Most of the time, I don’t have one at all…” _Or it goes into overdrive as a coping mechanism_ , he neglects to add.

“Well…” Molly begins flirtatiously, and Will feels himself begin to smile almost immediately. He loved it when Molly thought the exact opposite of what he would think in her position. Sure enough, rather than leaping to the self-deprecating notion that she’d somehow turned him off sex entirely, she teases, “When you start with the best, it’s all going to pale in comparison, isn’t it?”

After a night of dreaming about _the best_ , Will awakens with a raging hard-on. When he gets out of bed, Molly stirs, but doesn’t wake up. By the time he gets to the bathroom and starts the shower running, he wishes he’d woken her and they were naked together right now.

Just thinking about Molly stripping off her clothes makes him hard again. He doesn’t even want to wait until she’s undressed, though she’s deliciously curvy and so, so soft. He strokes himself idly for a while, then, fearing he’d been in the shower a suspiciously long time for him, grasps his cock firmly and finishes, panting, forehead pressed against the shower wall. 

He rinses semen off his hand, unable to remember the last time he’d done this. In this moment, feeling as good as he does, he can only imagine that he jacks off so infrequently as one of the many ways in which he punishes himself.

The lust leaves him before long, as it always does, but, when Molly comes out to the shed bearing coffee a little while later, he takes her up on her offer, and kisses her. It feels exactly the same as the first time he kissed her, and they both come out of it as bashful and awkward as if they were teenagers again.

A few hours before they collect Walter from the airport, it occurs to Will to ask Molly, “Why’d you come upstairs the other night?”

Molly shrugs. “Just nosey, I guess.”

“Come on.”

“No, really. You got all quiet before bed. Quieter than usual. So, I went to see what was up with you. But then you were sleeping in the chair… Are you still sleeping in the chair?”

Will looks away, and, after a moment, gives a nod of admission.

“Is it something to do with _him_?”

He shakes his head.

“Still don’t wanna talk about it, huh?”

He shakes his head again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just… You can sleep downstairs with us if you want. The three of us fit fine on your bed.”

“Okay.” He brings his eyes back to her face and gives her a smile to unknot the worry between her eyebrows. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

But Will has no intention of doing that. He’s been dancing around a decision since he and Molly had stayed up all night talking.

He isn’t being fair. Not to Molly, who had always been content with however much or little they had – and had always been content with however much or little attention he paid her. She deserves more than random bouts of concern over her happiness. More than a friend that constantly tunes out because he’s thinking about his own problems.

He’s not being fair to Walter, who couldn’t possibly understand why he has to share a room with his mom and her ex-husband in a house this size. He’s so Molly-like in his easygoingness that it somehow seems doubly unfair.

He’s not even being fair to Abigail, who deserves to be thought of as more than impressions on a bedspread that make his heart pang. Would Abigail even care if he kept her room the way she left it? Probably not. She’s not her bed, or her chair, or the loose floorboard, or her ashtray, or the little pile of books on the window sill. Abigail is life, and wherever she is, it isn’t here.

Will is hoarding this bit of space on the second floor, like a shrine to Abigail, yet he’s keeping any real thought of her locked away. He can’t bear to change anything in her bedroom, in case tomorrow is the day he can finally face her – and he needs this room as a conduit to the one she has in his memory palace. What if tomorrow he can think of her without his chest caving in, but he’s erased the physical proof she was ever here?

They pick Walter up around seven, and Will treats them to a meal out, at a restaurant that boasted _casual fine dining_ , whatever that meant.

Wally can’t wait to tell them about the surprise. “There’s a new colt! He’s mine. I get to help break him in next time.”

“Did you name him?” Will asks.

“Yeah. He’s called Sir Cadogan. He’s real silly.”

“Nice,” says Molly, adding, to Will, “Harry Potter.”

“Ah.”

“Did you go see your dad?”

Walter shakes his head. “Mamamma said it was okay if I didn’t want to go.”

Molly nods and reaches over to ruffle his hair. “What did you guys do for your birthday?”

“Went bowling!” This launches Walter into another stream of excited chatter, which ultimately circles back to Sir Cadogan and how they are already best friends.

Molly has to remind him three times to at least finish his chicken strips.

Will had been sneaking drinks all day, and had a couple beers at dinner. One more shot of whiskey when they get home, for good measure, and, by bedtime, offering Walter Abigail’s old room doesn’t feel like killing part of himself.

To Will’s utter perplexity, Walter declines. He waits until Molly is in the bathroom to tell Will, “Mom thinks it’d make you sad.”

Momentarily stricken, Will manages, “Why did she say that?”

Walter shrugs. “Is upstairs haunted?”

Will shakes his head, frowning. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“It’s not just the _dead_ that can haunt you.”

Despite the precocious delivery being intrinsically funny, it’s such a gloomy statement – even by Will’s standards – he is alarmed into asking, “Where the hell did you hear that?”

Walter shrugs again, watching him, solemn and attentive, and Will starts to seriously worry that Walter might have heard it from _him_.

His memory is inconvenient that way – eidetic in so many useless ways, while unwisely culling half the shit that comes out of his own mouth. How is he supposed to learn from his mistakes if he can’t remember most of them?

Thankfully, Molly rejoins them before he is forced to come up with a response. The relief is short-lived, though, because, after sending Wally off to brush his teeth, she gives Will an _are you coming?_ look.

He gives a non-committal shake of his head, which could be interpreted as an outright _no_ , or just a _not yet_.

Upstairs a short while later, Will tries – really _tries_ – to get into the bed. He’d been preparing all day for the grief of losing this space, though, and is not drunk enough to handle confronting it again. He would have felt sad, and guilty, for letting Walter replace Abigail in this way, but he would have felt relief, too, at never having to be in her room again.

He wanted it to be someone else who wiped out the final traces of her – flattening the dents in the bedspread and making new ones in their own shape.

Will goes downstairs and starts coffee and breakfast early, in case Molly came upstairs to wake him and found him in the chair again. He doesn’t know how many more times he can get away with not explaining, without her getting truly worried.

His plan only half works, as Molly notices the crick in his neck, and beckons him over, massaging the back of it until Walter is ready for school.

Will doesn’t remember about Molly’s week off until she comes into the shed with another cup of coffee for him. She leans against the workbench, sipping her own coffee, watching him plane a piece of hardwood to replace one of the planks on the boat’s deck.

“What’s up?” Will asks.

Molly shrugs. “Thought I’d come out here. Maybe try and make a move on you.”

“You haven’t decided?”

She smiles. “I’m just feeling out the room. Seeing if you’re amenable to having moves made on you.”

Will feels his own face break into a smile. “Still got moves?” He leans the plank against the hull and brushes wood shavings off his jeans as he walks back over to her.

“Oh, you better believe it.”

He plants a hand on either side of her, and kisses her deeply before he can come up with a reason not to.

She sets her coffee aside and takes his face in her hands, pressing herself right up against him as she kisses him back.

His arms find their way around her waist and he lifts her onto the workbench. She cages him in with her knees. He kisses her neck, then just nuzzles it for a moment. She is so soft and smells so good. She tilts her head to expose more of her neck, and sighs in contentment when he starts kissing it again. Her eyes slip shut.

“Do you want me?”

He finds her mouth again and moans an assent into it, as she undoes his fly and slips her hand inside his briefs. He’s hard in seconds.

She starts stroking him, slowly at first, and then persistently, and then with her mouth locked on his, her own moans vibrating against his lips. And before long –

“Oh, Molly. Ah… _Ah_ …”


	9. Old Habits, New Forts

Will isn’t sure what to do after this surprise handjob. Molly goes back inside to change her shirt, the hem of which was used to contain the mess when he came in her hand. Already warm from the work he was doing and now burning, he peels off the long-sleeved plaid, mops his forehead and wipes the head of his cock before zipping back up. Molly doesn’t come back out, and he considers following her to the house, but, instead, finds himself leaving the shed through the back, and ending up at the stream.

It’s sunny out, and everything is green. Dappled light hits the waters, revealing them to be alive with rainbow and brook trout. It’s exactly how he’d always imagined this place to be when he thought about taking Abigail fishing. He doesn’t want to think about that.

He strips off his shoes and socks and rolls up his pant legs. He closes his eyes as he wades in, transporting himself to the beach, instead. The fish he feels skirting his ankles are the shallow waves at Pensacola, and they are chasing after Molly’s veil which is determined to lose itself in the bay.

Molly laughs as it floats away out of reach. She returns to the shore, dress wet up to her knees, to throw the bouquet.

He recalls it so vividly; he is able to believe for a moment that he’s gone back to that time. But the sun quality on his eyelids is not the same. It’s the crisp sunlight of late spring, not the pulsating sunlight of mid-summer, and, while he’d been warm in his suit there in Florida, he is getting chilly in his t-shirt here in Virginia.

He walks back to the house, and spots Molly sunning herself on the front lawn. She waves at him as he approaches, shielding her eyes against the sun that is climbing its way up to high noon. Her smile fades when he gets close, and, too late, he realizes there is nothing covering the mess of scars on his arm.

Suddenly pale, she takes them in one by one. The thin, white smaller scars close to his wrist, and dotted eyelet pattern of the sutures; and the long, raised, welt-like ones just under his elbow.

Coming to a stop in front of her, Will shoves his hands in his pockets and studies the ground. “Any chance you could pretend you’re not seeing this?”

Molly pulls him down onto the grass next to her, shaking her head emphatically. She takes his arm, and, seeing the full extent of the damage, gasps, “Oh my god, Will. What _happened_?”

Knowing that this revelation had to happen sometime doesn’t prevent the rush of shame Will feels.

She is studying the evidence of the deepest wounds, and her voice goes up an octave. “It looks like you were hurting yourself! You never did that before!”

He summons what he hopes is a reassuring tone and countenance. “I wasn’t trying to. I had an accident is all.”

She looks like she’s trying very hard to believe him. Almost desperately, in fact. Will hates rendering Molly speechless.

After a few moments, she takes a deep breath and lets go of his arm. “It must have hurt,” she says, letting him off the hook for the nth time.

The next morning, Will gets up early again, and goes back down to the stream, this time equipped with rod and lures. He doesn’t think about the wedding, or fishing with Abigail. He doesn’t think about anything – just focuses on the glittering water, and listens to the plant and animal life around him, trying to disappear into the tranquil green. To fade into the scenery. For two whole hours, it feels as though he has succeeded.

When he returns to the house, Will finds it quiet. Walter is still home, lying flat on his stomach on the living room floor, fully engrossed in the fourth Harry Potter book.

“Hey kid, don’t you have school?”

Walter looks up. “Yeah. What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

Walter jumps to his feet and races into the hallway where he stands and hollers, “ _MOM!_ ”

In the bedroom, Molly is just waking up. Catching sight of the clock, she sits up suddenly, visibly relieved when Will comes in fully dressed. “Can you take him?”

“I can’t drive…”

“Oh.” Molly slaps her cheeks lightly to wake herself up. As she stands and starts getting dressed, she asks, “Because of your stroke?”

He nods.

“Sorry, babe. I didn’t think about that.” A minute later, she’s out the door with Walter.

When she returns, Will apologetically tells Molly, “I never got my license back.”

“You have all this open space to practice!” She takes the coffee he hands her and gratefully gulps down half of it.

“I don’t have a car anymore.”

“You never feel stranded out here?”

“I like it.” Will sets his mug on the railing and flexes his hand, repressing that week he’d spent hating Hannibal for leaving him here alone while the team solved the Carpenter case. Or, rather, while _Hannibal_ solved it and took the law into his own bloodstained hands.

Molly turns and rests her elbows on the railing, drumming her fingers on the side of her coffee mug. After a minute or two of quietly appraising the landscape, she looks over at him and says, “I could never understand why we stayed in the city after you graduated.”

“You _did_ understand.”

“Sure, I know it would have been hard for either of us to get work.”

“Isn’t that reason enough?”

“I’m just saying, I don’t know how you kept doing what you were doing when you get so much peace from places like this.”

“I compartmentalized.”

“Yeah, that’s what you told me back then, too. Something about building forts.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it different working at Quantico?”

Will shakes his head. “Apparently my reputation preceded me.”

“You mean they had you working cases?”

“Just consulting at first. Before things got messy. I… had to build new forts.”

“Did that stop working? Is that why you’re not teaching there anymore?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Will nods.

“I’m sorry,” Molly says.

Will avoids her eyes. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

Molly’s voice becomes stern. “There’s a big difference between pity and sympathy. You ought to know that.”

He drops his head and concedes, “I do know that.” Looking sideways at her, he sees her face is quite serious. He tugs her closer by the knot of the plaid shirt she has tied about her waist. “Come over here.”

Molly runs her hand down his bad arm, then clasps the hand between both of hers and brings it to her face like she’s going to inspect it – but she just rests her chin atop their tangled fingers, sighs, and asks, “Are you okay, Will?”

Meeting her eyes, at last, her steady gaze holding him, he is able to say with absolute honesty, “I’m better now you’re here.”

They kiss, but it only lasts a moment before Molly runs her tongue over her teeth and says, “Ugh. I need to brush.” She gives him another quick peck anyway. “Thanks for the coffee, babe.” She takes their empty mugs and disappears inside.

When Will eventually follows suit, he props the door open so the dogs are free to come back inside when they please. He filets that morning’s catch and poaches the guts in boiling water to grind into dog food later. Molly naps on the couch. Evidently, she did need a break, and wasn’t just worried about money.

He spends the rest of the morning going from practicing his fly-tying, to getting frustrated, to directing that frustration at housework, and back again. By one in the afternoon, all the floors are swept, the windows are gleaming, and the kitchen and bathroom are spotless – and he still has nothing to show for his more creative efforts besides a lot of loose thread and a farrago of bone fragments and feathers.

He returns to the kitchen to make up the dogs’ food and get a ridiculous head-start on dinner prep.

Molly stirs when Will finally herds the dogs back inside. He sees her shift a little in her sleep, and goes to shake her shoulder gently.

“Hey, hotshot,” she greets him around a yawn.

“Why don’t you go back to bed?”

She stretches her arms over her head and flexes her feet. “Nah.” She sits up and asks, “What are you cooking?”

“Just roasting some vegetables. They won’t be done for a while. Are you hungry?”

“No, it just smells good.” She gives him an easy smile. “What are you up to?”

He bites the inside of his cheek. “I was thinking…”

“Thinking what?” Molly tugs him down onto the couch next to her and leans over to lay her head on his shoulder.

“Well…” Will clears his throat and rushes the rest of the words out before he can change his mind. “Why don’t _we_ go back to bed?”

Molly wants to have sex, but, true to his inability to make a decision one way or another, Will changes his mind once they get to the bedroom, afraid of what might happen if they actually do. He goes down on her, instead. Once he feels her thighs start to tremble, though, he suddenly can’t wait to get inside her.

Will flips back and forth a few more times while they fool around, discarding articles of clothing one at a time between heavy kisses, his hand between her legs, her hand on his cock. He’s unable to tell the difference between his anxiety and his arousal, and he’s hard as can be, either way.

Finally, Molly straddles him and whispers against his lips, “Please, Will. I want you.” She lifts her hips and reaches down to guide him into her.

He puts a hand over hers, and, together, they slide the head of his cock back and forth over her wet slit a couple times. Then she removes her hand and he wraps his arm around her waist, pressing up into her as she lowers herself, until he’s fully inside.

Suddenly, Will’s mind feels clear for the first time in months. He’s so relieved that it’s all he can do not to burst into tears.

Molly feels it when his breath catches in his throat, and runs a hand down his back, then back up and into his hair. She lifts his chin with her other hand and kisses him soundly.

His lip trembles, even with hers steadily pressed against his. He has to tell her, even if his voice breaks.

“You feel amazing,” she murmurs, beating him to it.

In a gasp of gratitude, he breathes back, “You feel _perfect_.”

They are both quiet the whole time, even as they climax. They climax together, all their muscles tensing and then slowly relaxing.

Afterward, Will says, “We don’t have to be quiet here.” Still catching his breath, he adds, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I live really far out.”

Molly falls back, legs still wrapped around his waist, panting. Her hair is splayed out all around her head like a halo, her bangs sticking in places to her forehead. “Old habits,” she answers, and giggles.

After a minute, she climbs off him, and collapses back against the pillows, arms flopped on either side of her head.

Will lies back as well and turns his face to look at her.

She rolls onto her side and slides a leg between his, rubbing his calf with her foot. Her thigh grazes his balls as she wriggles closer. It feels nice. She feels nice, pressed up against him. He touches her cheek.

“I’ve wanted to do that for like a month,” she says, with a contented sigh.

“Me too. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the first day you got here.”

“Me too.”

“How the fuck have I been living without you?”

“Beats me.”


	10. Nowhere Near Your Butt

“Looks like you’re chewing on something there,” Molly observes after they’ve lain for a bit in companionable silence. “Wanna talk?”

Will swallows. He really, _really_ does. He wants to talk with _Molly_. He wants her to know everything, and to tell him it’s okay and things can be different. Things can be good. _He_ can be good. “In a minute,” he manages.

“Okay.” She gives him one more kiss and climbs over him out of bed. “I’m gonna go clean up.”

When she comes back, she hands him a towel and scoops their clothes off the floor. “Walter will be getting on the bus any minute now,” she tells him, as she pulls on her underwear and shimmies back into her pants.

Will wipes himself off and follows her lead. Somehow, they didn’t get anything on the sheets, so they just make the bed and sit atop the covers.

“So, what’s up?”

“Nothing bad.”

“Feeling a little raw?”

He nods.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Really?”

“Not as raw as you, I bet.” She reaches over and runs her fingers through his hair once. “You do keep it bottled up, don’t you?”

“Guilty.”

“Can I help?”

Will smiles and rests his hand on her thigh. “You just did.”

Molly just smiles back.

“Things feel so right with you. They always did. I guess I just…”

“Forgot _how_ right?”

Will nods.

“Me too.”

“It’s a little overwhelming.”

“A lot of time has passed. Lots has happened.”

“Sure has.”

Molly touches his bad arm. “Will you tell me what the accident was?”

“You really want to know?”

“Mhm.”

“It’s a long story…”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me all at once.”

“Well…” Will shuffles back so he can lean against the wall. “Um.”

Molly adopts the same position, sitting next to him so that eye contact is possible, but not unavoidable. When she has stretched her legs out and gotten comfortable, and Will is still stuck at _um_ , she says, “Good start,” and playfully jostles his elbow with hers.

He forces himself to begin somewhere. “A couple years ago I got sick,” he tells her, not sure if he’s going back _too_ far, or not far enough.

“What kind of sick?”

“Encephalitis. I ended up being hospitalized.”

“Yikes.”

Will gives her an uncertain glance. “It gets worse…”

Molly just nods for him to continue.

“I was hallucinating all the time. Had blackouts. Seizures.”

“Jesus,” Molly whispers.

“Yeah. It was bad.” The groundwork laid, Will now has to decide what to simply obfuscate and what to actually modify. “I was working in the field at the time.”

“Oh, no…”

“You see where this is headed.”

“I can’t imagine anywhere good.”

“It’s about to get unbelievable.”

Molly puffs up her cheeks and lets the air out with a _whoosh_. “Okay, hit me.”

“There was this serial killer we were after – turned out to be someone on the inside of the investigation, and… at some point I must’ve pissed him off, because he framed me.”

“ _What_?”

“Successfully.”

“What? _How_?”

“I’m not entirely clear on that.”

“You’re messing with me.”

“I wouldn’t make something like that up.”

She sighs. “I know. That’s the _only_ reason I believe you, though. This is nuts.”

“Tell me about it.”

“How did I not hear about this?”

“It was pretty big in the Chesapeake area, but it wasn’t national news.”

“Okay,” she says, and, after a deep breath, “Go on.”

“My boss, Jack Crawford, had me seeing a psychiatrist so he wouldn’t feel guilty about putting me in the field. I was already sick when I started working for him, but I didn’t know, and it just kind of…”

“Got out of hand?” she prompts.

He’s telling her too much. He’d wanted to tell her about the encephalitis so she knew that hallucinations were a thing with him, and she wouldn’t be too shocked when he got to the main event. But he’s painting a goddamn scenic landscape where he could have got away with some stick figures. “This isn’t relevant. I don’t–”

“No, tell me,” Molly coaxes.

Will collects his thoughts, and goes on. “When the killer set me up, I was so fucked in the head already… I actually believed I’d killed a bunch of girls.”

“Oh my god…” Molly breathes.

This next part is going to hurt a bit. “I was having these paranoid hallucinations…” Will has to pause to swallow his resentment. He clears his throat before continuing, telling himself he can set aside time to hate Hannibal later. “I got it in my head that my psychiatrist was the real killer and that he used me. So, I broke out of jail and took a shot at him.”

“You _broke out of jail_.”

“Out of a transport van, rather.”

“Still.”

“Anyway, Jack got there just in time.”

“That how you got this?” Molly reaches out her hand to brush her fingers against the fabric over his bullet scar.

“Yeah.” He gives her a weak smile. “You’re good.” He presses pause on their conversation, to both get his breathing in check and to retrieve a long-sleeved shirt to cover up the rest of his scars.

Molly waits for him to rejoin her before asking, “Then what?”

“Well, they found the encephalitis,” he says, focusing (with some actual necessity) on buttoning up the flannel, “but they still thought I was the killer, so, after they treated it, they locked me up.”

“ _Prison_?!”

“Institution.”

Molly is reeling, and Will isn’t sure whether or not to continue, so it’s with perfect timing that Walter clatters into the house and yells, “ _Anyone hooooome_?” They hear him bound towards the bedroom, and Molly presses pause this time, giving his hand a reassuring squeeze.

Walter comes in and flops down on the bed in exaggerated exhaustion.

“Long day, kid?” Molly teases, stretching her foot out to poke him in the side.

Walter sits up and tells them, “We had assembly. It was sooo boring. And, oh–!” He bounces to his knees, fishing around in his pockets for something. He hands Molly a half-folded-half-crumpled piece of paper. “It’s what’s left after selling the chocolates.”

Molly opens it and strokes Walter’s hair absently while she looks it over. At a glance, Will can see it’s an invoice. “This for outdoor ed?” he asks Walter.

Walter nods.

“I’ll write a check.”

“No–” Molly starts to protest.

Will shushes her as he takes the paper, knowing full well that shushing is Molly’s domain. She narrows her eyes at him, but can’t altogether wipe the smile off her face. “Remind me later,” he says to Walter, handing the paper back to him.

“I’ll put it on the fridge. Thanks, Will!” And just like that, Walter is off again.

After a beat, Molly says, “Okay,” and looks at him expectantly.

“Intermission over?”

“Yep. What happened next?”

“Essentially, the killer killed again while I was incarcerated; they figured it wasn’t me, after all, and they let me go.”

Molly sits quietly processing for a little while. Then, “Wait. Was this all before or after your stroke?”

“Before.”

“Christ.”

“Sure you want me to keep going?”

Molly doesn’t answer immediately, but scoots a little closer. She lays a hand on his cheek and kisses him with the same passion as she had when they were going at it less than an hour ago. Somehow, this tale is not appalling her. Isn’t changing her, or how she feels. She laces their fingers together and holds their hands in her lap. “Yes. Keep going.”

“Well, I didn’t learn my lesson. I kept taking cases.”

“Did you at least keep seeing a therapist?”

“The same one, actually. I know,” he says, seeing the look of surprise on her face. “He said that _certain events_ made him uniquely qualified to help me.”

Molly smells a rat, and says so. “I’ve known you forever, but if you took a shot at me, even if you were sick at the time… I mean, what was he playing at?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Molly just shakes her head and says, “Go on, then.”

“Uh…”

“You were taking cases and seeing the therapist you almost shot. _Almost_ , right?”

“Yeah, almost. Anyway, I had a stroke. I’m okay now,” he adds, seeing that she is seconds away from tearing up. “I just didn’t recover very well…”

She rests her head against the wall. “Your arm?”

He nods. “My whole left side, really, but I couldn’t even move my arm. I started hallucinating again. I thought I couldn’t move it because it wasn’t really mine… I couldn’t make myself accept it for any length of time. There’s a medical name for it I don’t remember.”

“You _do_ remember; you just don’t want to say because you know I’ll look it up.”

Will’s mouth quirks up and he admits, “ _Somatoparaphrenia_.”

Her eyes flick away from his for a moment and he can see her taking a mental note. She recaptures his gaze and asks, “Do you still… have that?”

“No.” He looks down at his arm just to be sure. Still his. “It took a really long time to get over, though, even when I wasn’t drugged up anymore. I still can’t use it as well as before.”

“I did notice. I just didn’t want to say anything.”

“I know.”

“I’m glad you’re telling me now.”

Will manages a half-smile. “If I’m traumatizing you, at least I’m not boring you…”

“Are you kidding?” She lets out a small laugh. “The only way this story could be more compelling is if it turned out the psychiatrist you tried to shoot is this mysterious ex-lover of yours.” When Will doesn’t say anything, her jaw drops. “ _Shut the front door!_ ”

That immediately breaks any tension, and Will snickers.

Molly swats him and says, “Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“No, don’t.” She takes his hand back. “I’m listening. What about these?” She runs her fingers over his arm like the scars are guitar strings she’s strumming.

Will starts to tell her, and stops again. “Fuck,” he mutters under his breath. “It’s _bad_ , Molly.”

“I don’t want to make you say it, but… do you _want_ to say it?”

Molly had always been of the opinion that a burden shared is a burden halved. This isn’t a burden, though. It’s an embarrassment. His face feels hot. He rubs his hands over it. Feels the threat of tears. Is there a way to explain his unstable behaviour to Molly without exhibiting it here and now? Probably not.

Once again very timely, Walter calls from the kitchen, “Something’s burning!”

“Shit.”

“Your vegetables?”

Will nods.

“I got it,” Molly says, and leaves him alone for a few minutes.

When she comes back, Will is no more decided about what to say. Their eyes meet briefly as she settles back down next to him, and, in that split second, she clearly gathers this.

“I’m curious,” she begins, and, even before a sly smile starts to spread across her face, he can tell that she’s about to save him in one way or another. “Did you top or bottom?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, you never let _me_ anywhere near your butt.”

“Yeah, not much has changed.”

“Not much?”

“Twice, okay?”

“Ugh. Lucky him.”

“You have _no_ idea how lucky,” he says, trying to cover a sudden onslaught of melancholy with what hopefully passes as playful grumbling. “But it’s nothing to do with me.”

“You don’t sound pleased about it.”

“Not particularly.”

Molly frowns, perhaps regretting her attempt to have a lighter conversation. She opens her mouth to say something.

Will cuts her off. “Molly. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Molly draws back quickly at his tone. “Okay.”

He wishes he could physically kick himself. She was probably just going to say _never mind_ , and not ask any more questions. He pinches the bridge of his nose, knowing this conversation is the epitome of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

She puts a hand on his, then takes his wrist and gives his arm a little shake to get him to look at her. “I’m sorry, babe.”

Voice not quite normal, still sounding a little clipped, he says, “It’s okay. I know what you were trying to do.”

“What?”

“Change the subject without changing it too much.”

“Well, I didn’t want you to think I don’t care, if you wanted to keep talking.”

“I know. Because you’re lovely. And sweet. And right.” Why does he sound so panicked? “I just can’t,” he concludes, quickly.

In a very different tone, Molly asks, “Did he violate you?”

He can’t tell for sure, but he thinks she might be angry. “You could say we violated each other.”

When it’s clear he isn’t going to elaborate, Molly just squeezes his arm and asks, “You want a little time? Clear your head a bit?”

Will nods.

She straightens up and suddenly shouts, “Walter!” at top volume.

Will jumps. “Jesus,” he says, and manages a small chuckle.

Molly leans over and presses her forehead against his for a moment, kisses him again, then leaves the bedroom, calling, “Walter, let’s go for a drive!”


	11. Forty Going North

It occurs to Will, as he hears the front door close, that _a little time_ is not what he needs. What he needs is to use his time _better_ , and to stop living in this liminality just because he can.

Unwelcome, but inevitable – and, as Will reluctantly recognizes, necessary – thoughts of the last time he saw Hannibal manage to seep through the cracks in his fort. He was maximally liminal that day. He’d confessed his inability to ever see anything only one way, and the paralysis that leaves him in. Was he hoping Hannibal would have a surprise solution to his mental chaos?

He was so angry, for so much of that conversation, and at the same time, not even whole enough to be the source of that anger. And anger didn’t prevent him from letting Hannibal back in – to his mind, and his pants. By the time the sex happened, Will’s own self had disintegrated so much that Hannibal might as well have been humping the ground. Yet, he’d never felt more whole, and that made him angrier.

He knew then, and he knows now, that when Hannibal filled him, it was for the sheer purpose of making Will more himself. More Hannibal – blurring the lines between them once more, before Will tried to resolve them. Not letting him get away easy.

Will grits his teeth against the wave of fresh anger he expects, but it doesn’t come. Instead, his heart pangs at the memory of Hannibal losing control inside him, breath hot against his neck and teeth grazing his skin. It continues to ache in his chest, as he recalls the void of loneliness that took shape once they were both spent – rising from their conjoined form like a soul leaving the body. They got to their feet and it hovered there, while Will made his confession, and wasted no time unfurling between them once he was done.

When his mind begins to replay in slow motion every micro-expression that crossed Hannibal’s face as he listened, Will makes a beeline for the bottle.

_I need things to be clear before I see you again_ , he’d said to Hannibal at the end, a statement that implied Will would be seeking clarity, not avoiding it. Does he owe it to Hannibal to comb their relationship for any previous indication that it could work between them? Defiantly, he thinks, _no_ , while, in the same instance, feels, _yes_.

He’s not about to do it without help, though. He’s several whiskeys in when Molly and Walter get home.

Molly leaves her coat on and slides into the chair across the table from him. “How’re you doing?”

“Better.”

“Better _enough_? Wally’s going straight to bed and he’ll be out like a light, but I can go out again.”

Will shakes his head. “You didn’t have to go out at all.”

Molly shrugs.

“Sorry I freaked out earlier.”

“Sorry I was so nosy.”

“I didn’t realize it was going to be _that_ hard to talk about.”

She reaches out and cups his cheek. “You told me a lot today. A lot that wasn’t any of my business.”

“I wanted to.”

“Doesn’t make it easy.”

“No. No, it doesn’t.”

“I mean, I know talking doesn’t ever really come easy to you…”

“It’s not that…”

“Oh?”

“I mean, not _just_ that.”

“What else?”

“Not sure…” Will studies the tabletop and tries to identify the discomfort in the pit of his stomach. It’s not the panic he’s so used to housing there, but something equally unsettling. “I guess… I never thought I’d be questioning stuff like this at forty going north.”

“Stuff like what?”

“You know.”

“Hm.” Molly gets up and fetches a glass for herself. “Will you pour one for me?” She goes to hang up her coat, and looks in on Walter before rejoining him. “Out like a light,” she confirms.

They clink glasses with a harmonized, _santé_ , before continuing their conversation.

“Do you _need_ to question?” Molly takes a sip, then adds, “If a bond is strong enough, does it really matter what bits and pieces are involved?”

Will indicates the bottle of whiskey. “I’ve been hard at work trying _not_ to question, which probably means I should.”

“Might as well question out loud, then,” she suggests.

“I suppose so.”

“Do you have a preference?”

“I don’t know. I never slept with any other men.”

“On purpose?”

“Like I said before, it was a non-issue.”

“You never sought it out, with men _or_ women.”

Will nods. “Occasionally, a woman pursued me.”

“But he was the first man to?”

“If there were others, I was _blissfully unaware_ of them.” He gives her a wry smile.

Molly is still on her first drink as Will pours himself a fifth. _Second_ , he tells himself, deciding not to count the three he’d had before she got here.

“Look, maybe you never meet another man you want to sleep with.” Molly laces their fingers together and smiles playfully. “Maybe you never meet another woman, and I’m it.”

Will runs his thumb along the blade of her index finger. “I’m good with that.”

“Or maybe you do either, or both, or stop having sex altogether.”

“It wasn’t even about sex.”

“Yeah, I know, babe. That much, at least, is obvious. If it was just about sex, you wouldn’t be this cut up about it.”

“I’m not…”

“You’re a little cut up.”

He sighs. “Shared trauma might not be the best foundation for a healthy relationship.”

That leaves Molly pensive for a moment, before she muses, “Is there such a thing as that?”

“There’s got to be.”

“Like having… relationship capital.”

“That’s a really apt way of putting it.”

“Did we have good capital?”

“I don’t know that it mattered.”

“That’s my point.”

“Huh.”

“I know _you_ know that you can’t just philosophize about this stuff. You have to experience it.”

“I liked experiencing _you_ today.”

“Doesn’t mean you prefer women. Just that you prefer _me_.” She gives him a coquettish look from beneath her lashes. “And how could you not?”

He smiles. _How could he not_. “It’d be nice to be sure of something, though. For a change.”

Molly has a thought then, one that she voices almost timidly. “You know… it’s okay that you still have feelings for him.”

“No. It’s not.”

“You might have them forever, though.”

“Then I hope forever isn’t as long as we all think it is.”

“You feel one way about him, and another about me. That’s not hurting anyone.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Well, _you_ , I bet. I bet you’re beating yourself up about it.”

“Stop being right.”

“Nah.”

Will huffs a small laugh.

“All I’m saying is, we’re old enough that our wants won’t hurt us.”

“And getting older…”

“I was definitely younger at the start of this conversation,” she teases, and, before he can pour himself a sixth drink and start getting wasted, she stands and says, “Come on. You’re two sheets to the wind. Let’s go to bed before it becomes three.”

Will is in a mood for all of Tuesday morning. He tries to cover it up by pretending he has a hangover, but he’s already doctored that with some vodka he has hidden in the shed, tucked behind the wine bottles in the open case of Montrachet. When he goes back for a top-up, he regards the plywood stacked against the wall, and the planks he hadn’t yet smoothed down.

Molly comes out of the kitchen when she hears him clatter through the front door with the step ladder. “What’s the project?”

He tries his hardest not to sound clipped, because his mood has nothing to do with her or Walter, but he still sounds a little gruff when he says, “Putting up a wall so Walter can have a bedroom.”

Will assembles his materials in what might have been a dining room, if he hadn’t played so fast and loose with the floorplan. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but he’d thought several times about moving his bed back into the living room. Margot and Judy had the window replaced while he was in the hospital. When Molly and Walter arrived, he was glad he hadn’t done it.

Molly doesn’t crowd him while he takes measurements or assembles the frame but does give him a hand getting it upright and in place.

“I can guess what happened to your arm,” she starts, in a lull between the pneumatic cracking of the nail gun.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. So, maybe… it’d be easier for you to say out loud if I already know?”

Will’s silence is a response in itself.

“When you’re ready to talk about it.”

He nods. Though done with the nails, he remains crouched down to hide how warm his face is, and his body’s sudden suggestion that crying might be a good idea.

“The amount of guilt you feel…” Molly sighs. “You’re ashamed of _so_ many things.” She rests her forearms on one of the noggings, leaning forward through the frame. _No hiding from Molly_. Will is annoyed at her for not letting it go, that is, until she gives him a small smile and adds, “Anyone might think you’re a Catholic.”

With a weak answering smile, he replies, “Too bad I’m not. It’d be great to think Jesus loves me.”

“What about if _I_ love you?”

“Even better.”

“Well, I do, you know.”

Will’s bad mood evaporates. “Dear Molly…”

Around two in the afternoon, Will has finished all he can do without a trip to the hardware store. Molly suggests he drive, and, hesitantly, Will agrees. Everything is fine, at first, but, just before they get to the main road, Will suddenly gets the idea that he hasn’t been correcting enough, and swerves violently, trying to correct all at once.

“Mother of ducks!” Molly shrieks.

Will hits the brakes, and they have to sit there for a full minute while he laughs his head off.

Molly shoves him and shouts, “What did you do that for?!”

“Sorry,” he gasps out, wiping his eyes. When he can speak again, he explains, “I panicked for a second.”

“I’ll tell you if you’re veering! Jesus Christ!”

“Maybe you should just drive,” he says. If her reaction hadn’t been so funny, the sudden annihilation of any self-confidence he might have started with would be much worse.

“You can get us to the main road, at least. While I recover from my heart attack…”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, earnestly. As he starts forward again, though, he’s unable to suppress a final chuckle. “ _Mother of ducks…_ ”

“Shut up,” says Molly.

When they switch places at the main road, Will blurts out, “I love you, too, you know.”

They go to an outlet mall after the hardware store and find a little twin bed for Walter. They drive home with the flat pack and mattress tied to the roof of the car.

Will expects general Walter-level enthusiasm when he gets home from school but isn’t quite prepared to have the wind knocked out of him when the kid near tackles him with a hug.

“Wow, thanks, Will!”

Will has no idea how to respond and ends up patting him on the head awkwardly and rushing to say, “Your mom and I will go get some paint tomorrow,” before Walter can thank him any more. “What’s your favourite colour?”

Too excited to stand still, Walter manages to inform them, “It’s blue now!” before zooming off.

“His softball team’s colour,” Molly explains. She is watching Will warily.

Pretending he doesn’t notice, Will raps on the door frame with his knuckles and asks her, “Do you think he’ll want a door on here, or will it just slow him down?”

They go back to assembling the bedframe, and, when it’s complete and all the new bedding is in the wash, they say, simultaneously, “Drink?”

With a _cheers_ to teamwork and a bottle of beer each, they take a break before starting on dinner, slouching in the living room with their feet up.

In this moment, Will can’t fathom how he’d woken up so angry. He feels accomplished, and content – relaxed even.

The relaxed feeling disappears a little while later, and is replaced with tension when he overhears Molly and Walter talking while making up the bed.

“I have to tell you something.”

“Okay – wait, that’s the bottom…”

Some rustling.

“Okay, so, you and I love hugs…”

“Nobody loves hugs as much as you do, Mom.”

“Well, yes, you’re right, but… some people _don’t_ like to be touched. So, we have to be careful.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Oh, because, if you want to give Will a hug, ask first, okay?”

The flapping sound of the quilt being shaken out.

“ _You_ never ask. And you’re always kissing his cheek and stuff.” Walter is probably pulling a face.

“Well,” Molly retorts, “when you’re tall enough, you can kiss his cheek, too.”

Walter squeals, “That’s gross!”

“ _You’re_ gross.” Molly laughs. “I’ve known Will a long time,” she says after a moment. “And kissing is different.”

“Different how?”

“I’m not really sure. Kisses are okay, though, I guess.”

“Not hugs.”

“Hugs are probably okay, too. Just as long as you ask first.”

“That’s so weird.”

“ _You’re_ weird.”

“Why’d you say that to him?” Will asks when Molly comes to help him finish making dinner. He’s too perturbed to pretend he hadn’t been eavesdropping.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“How would you know?”

Molly looks puzzled. “You always made it pretty clear.”

“I did?” He probably had. It used to be that he told her everything, or, at least, anything she asked.

Molly goes from looking puzzled to looking a little bit hurt. “I mean, you didn’t have to spell it out. I noticed.”

“That can’t be good.”

“Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure no one else did.” She gives him a small smile. “People hadn’t started psychoanalysing you yet. Are you upset?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You and Walter have a good thing. I didn’t want it to go south over something like a hug. He doesn’t need affection from you. He gets too much from me anyway.”

“I wouldn’t let a hug ruin this. I’m not _that_ fragile.”

“What about the expectation that hugs are going to happen? I don’t want you to dread doing nice things for him because he’s going to thank you by doing something you don’t like. Oh!” she laments. “Now you _are_ upset!”

“I’m not. I’m just thinking. What did I do that made you notice?”

“Well, whenever my mom hugged you, you avoided coming over for weeks…”

“I was just surprised she liked me enough to hug me.”

“ _Every_ time?”

“I’m not the kind of person whose confidence blossoms between awkward encounters.”

“What about Evelyn’s New Year’s party way back when? Everyone was drunk, including you, but you literally haven’t spoken to her since.”

“Huh. I guess I haven’t.”

“And when we graduated, and Mrs. What’s-her-name gave _everyone_ a hug – you, in turn, hugged the gym wall for the rest of the dance… I mean, have I been wrong all this time?”

“No. You’re not wrong. Though I seem to remember not wanting to be there.”

“You definitely didn’t want to be there. And I didn’t want to leave.” Molly thinks back and concludes, “I was pretty selfish that night.”

“How?”

“I could see you were having a rotten time. I was annoyed at you for not having fun. Were you annoyed at me?”

“I was envious. I think I was mad at you.”

“Teenagers…”

After dinner, Walter goes out to play, and Molly and Will return to the living room. Molly is still nursing a second beer, while Will had finished his second a quarter of the way through their meal and is now making progress through a third at a respectable pace.

Molly can tell he’s still thinking about earlier, and says so.

“I’m not upset,” Will promises. “Just… won’t Walter keep asking _why_?”

“I doubt it. He knows there’s not always an explanation.”

“There’s an explanation.”

“Not one he can understand. I don’t even think I understand.”

“It’s not something I could have articulated back then. Not sure I can articulate it _now_.”

“You don’t have to. You don’t have to explain why you don’t like it. It’s nobody’s business.”

“It’s a little bit _your_ business.”

“It’s not. I want it to be, but it’s not.”

“ _I_ want it to be.”

“Well, then, I’m listening.”

Will takes a hefty swig of his drink while trying to scrape the words together. “It almost always feels like a lie,” he says, at length. “A lie I’m all wrapped up in and forced to participate in. I know it _isn’t_ most of the time, for most people. I know that. It just feels that way.”

Molly swirls the remaining beer in her bottle and, after a moment, asserts, “That makes so much sense I can’t believe I didn’t put it together.”

“It does?”

“Mhm.” She polishes off her beer before asking, “It wasn’t like that with me?”

“Well… we were doing other things. Things it’s harder to lie about.”

Molly smirks. “We did those other things _first_.”

Will returns the smirk. “And often.”

They are quiet for a bit, then Molly, serious once more, says, “I’m sorry I talked to Walter about you when you weren’t there. That was not a good call.”

Will shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“It is?”

“Things are usually okay when you do them.”

“Shall I tell him hugs are okay after all?”

“That might be pushing it.”

The phone rings then, and Will answers.

_An inmate from FCI Pollock is attempting to contact you. This is a collect call._

He hands the phone to Molly, hearing the automated recording continue.

_To accept the charges, press one. To hear the rates, press two. To end this call, press zero. To block calls from this institution, press star._

“Mamamma must have given him your number. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Take it, if you want.”

She presses 1, setting her empty bottle on the floor, and immediately starts pacing. “Hi,” says Molly, when the call connects. “You doing okay? … We’re good. … Oh, good. They catch you up?” She goes over to the window and leans against the frame. “Well, it upset him last time, didn’t it? … He’s outside playing.” She waves to Walter outside, and, between relays with the dogs, Walter manages to wave back. “Maybe tomorrow, okay? I’ll talk to him tonight. … No, he’s not mad at you. I’m not, either. … I know you are, honey. Don’t keep apologizing. … Because it’s not fixing anything, is it? And because I’m getting real tired of thinking up ways to say, _it’s not okay, but it’s okay_.”

Though she’s turned away from him, Will can picture the exact frown on her face.

“Look, I’m sorry you’re lonesome. Next time we visit Mamamma, we’ll come see you, too. Together, okay? … You, too.”

When she hangs up, she rests her head against the glass for a moment, before returning the phone to its cradle and rejoining Will on the couch.

“I’m sorry,” she immediately says again.

“Don’t be. You okay?”

“I’m… frustrated. And I lied a bit. Wally _is_ mad at him; he just doesn’t know it.”

“Doesn’t know it?”

“I mean, he’s ten. He’s not gonna ask himself, _how do I really feel?_ He’s hurt. I thought he was just sad at first, and missing his dad, but…”

“What?”

“A little while ago he started saying stuff.”

“Stuff like?”

“ _If he really loved us_ , and stuff like that.”

“That’s pretty heavy.”

“Yup.” She purses her lips, pushing her bangs up off her forehead and then letting them fall back into place. With a sigh, she gets to her feet. “I’d better go talk to him.”

Molly goes outside, and Will stays put, though he wants to follow. Perhaps to hear her explain anger and love to her son, hoping she’d clear up for _him_ , too, how it’s okay – normal even – to feel both at the same time. Maybe then he could pack his feelings for Hannibal up for good.


	12. Cops & Robbers

The next day, as he and Molly are finishing up with the plywood and plaster board, Will broaches the subject simply by saying, “Wally’s father?”

Predictably, Molly starts with, “He’s not a bad guy or anything.”

“Okay.”

“He _never_ hurt Wally or me. And he wasn’t on drugs.”

“So what’s he in prison for?” Will asks gracelessly.

“I guess you could say he’s a different sort of addict…” She stops what she’s doing and leans back against the wall, looking tired all of a sudden.

Will can imagine the barrage of questions she would have had to deal with. From family, close friends. He can imagine how she would have been scrutinized, judged, as though Jake Landry’s bad decisions were hers, too. He goes over to her and sits beside her, shoulder to shoulder. “You don’t have to explain.”

She flashes a brief smile at him. “Force of habit.” She sucks her cheeks in, thinking over what to say. “He was into risky fun. Shoplifting, burglary, B&E’s… He was still joyriding at forty-five, for Christ’s sake…”

“Did he just like to see what he could get away with?”

“Yeah. I mean, he wasn’t making money. He just did it for the rush. Most of the time he gave back whatever he stole.”

“He just… gave it back.”

She nods. “That’s part of the reason I didn’t find out ’til he was arrested. There wasn’t random expensive stuff turning up. Anyway, it caught up to him eventually.”

“How?”

Molly shrugs. “One time he tried to give stuff back, the owner _really_ wasn’t happy about being robbed in the first place and called the police.”

“Oh.”

“I know. Sometimes, he’s a couple cards short of a full deck. But, to be fair, showing up and just returning things _worked_ , for like a really long time.”

Will picks up Molly’s hand and idly traces his fingertips over her palm. “That’s not so bad,” he says eventually.

She gives him another smile, a little less fleeting this time.

He bumps her shoulder with his own and teases, “So you like cops _and_ robbers.”

Molly rolls her eyes. “Shut up.”

They don’t worry about sealing up the gap between the wall and the ceiling, since they weren’t even going to put a door in. Will finds a thick dowel and some brackets in the shed and fashions a curtain rod. Molly sews loops onto a couple of old sheets with the scrap fabric from hemming Walter’s pants.

“Perfect,” Molly says as they stand back and appraise their work. They take the assembly down again so it doesn’t interfere with their painting. “It’ll be open most of the time anyway. Walter’s not a hide-in-your-room kind of kid.”

He is that evening, though, and, while he doesn’t shut the curtains, Walter stays in his room, evidently hard at work on some project.

“Did you choose someone for Night of the Notables?” Molly asks Walter at dinner.

“We didn’t get to choose. We picked names out of a hat.”

“Who’d you get?”

“Thomas Edison.”

“What’s Night of the Notables?” Will asks.

“It’s the end of year project.”

Molly explains further. “The kids each write a report about a famous person who contributed to American history in a positive way. Then they do a presentation for all the parents.”

“We’re supposed to dress up and everything.” Wally snickers. “Tommy got Eleanor Roosevelt.” Eager to get back to work, he finishes eating quickly and his dishes are in the sink before Molly and Will are even halfway done with their meals.

“I wonder how much crap that teacher is taking right now.”

“There might be an opening at Walter’s school next year if the parents of my kids are anything to go by.”

“When is it?”

“Well… They have camp next week…” Molly strikes out squares on the invisible calendar she draws with her fork. “And school is out on the 30th…” She jabs at what Will would guess is a Wednesday, the week before that. “Oh, wow. I guess only two weeks from now.”

The next evening, Walter asks Will if he can borrow his laptop, and Molly asks Walter if he’d remembered to return all those library books, and if he got through all of them.

“I got all of the stuff about Thomas Edison.”

“What do you need the laptop for, then? It’s cheating if you use Wikipedia.”

“No it’s not! All the other kids are doing it…” Walter whines.

“Well, they’re just being lazy.”

Walter pouts.

“Compromise?”

“What?”

“You can use the internet to add to your report _after_ you write the outline.”

Walter gives a long-suffering sigh. “ _Fine_.”

“Hard-ass,” Will mutters out the side of his mouth with a faint smirk as Walter stalks off.

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

Molly sticks her tongue out at him.

The following week, with Walter off at camp, and Molly back at work, Will realizes how easily he’d gotten used to sharing the house, and how empty it now feels without either of them here. He starts on dinner earlier than usual, but a one-pot slow cooker recipe is a poor choice for making the hours before Molly gets home go by faster.

After taking the dogs for an extended walk, he appraises the stack of potential course material he’d already gone through and compares it to the significantly smaller pile of what he has left. He’d have to submit a draft of the first-year material eventually, and, in his own mental calendar, he eyes the looming deadline.

Suddenly, he’s not all that sure he wants time to speed up. He is going to have to find a new purpose soon, and, feeling pre-emptively set adrift, he finds his skin prickling with unfocused anger.

When she gets home, Molly doesn’t pretend for a second that she doesn’t know something is bothering him, and Will wonders briefly how she decides when to ask and when not to.

He explains his fear of impending purposelessness.

“What about all the other courses?”

“They’ll be expecting me to take the summer off. Then they’ll have a trial semester and see if it’s worth it to hire me to do the rest of the program.”

“You’re not actually worried they’ll scrap it, are you?”

“No. But, pragmatically, I shouldn’t spend all day assembling material I don’t even know for sure is going to be taught.”

“Probably not.” She stares out the window thoughtfully. “You could use the time to get your license back. Go on a road trip or something,” she suggests. “Wally and I could look after the dogs.”

“Maybe.”

“Want to practise now?”

“Sure you want to get in a car with me again?”

“Just focus.” She puts her arms around his neck. “You were doing alright ’til you second-guessed yourself. Come on,” she coaxes, and it’s impossible for Will to remain prickly when she turns him by the shoulders and smacks him on the ass. “Let’s go.”

That evening at dinner, it’s Molly’s turn to be in a less than good mood, though she’s much better at hiding it that Will is. When he works up the nerve to ask what’s bothering her, she tells him, outright, “I keep thinking about _him_ ,” and it’s clear she’s not talking about Walter’s father.

In a tone he hopes sounds nonchalant rather than outright dismissive, Will replies, “Don’t.”

“I can’t help it, and I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that I don’t even know his name.”

“His name isn’t important.”

Molly seems genuinely puzzled by his reticence. Probably because a cursory internet search would give her Hannibal’s name, so why is he being so cagey? “Do you not want me to know?”

She’s asking his permission to do that cursory internet search, and Will loves her so much for it, he starts babbling. “It’s not that I don’t want you to know. It’s more… I don’t want to…”

“Be the one to tell me about him?”

“Not just you. Anyone. I don’t want to talk to _anyone_ about him.”

“Maybe you should talk to _him_ ,” Molly suggests softly.

Will puts his fork down and rubs a hand over his face before admitting to the tabletop, “I’m afraid to.”

There is a long, long pause, and, once again, Will senses without looking at her that Molly is angry, or something close to it. “Why, Will?”

“I don’t like who I am when I’m with him.”

“Sounds like there’s a _but_ coming.”

“But… I never know myself better.”

“ _I_ know you. I know you’re a decent, kind man.”

“You only think that because you bring out the best part of me.”

“The best part of you is still _you_ , silly. I think you forget that. Just because I notice it doesn’t mean I made it.”

Will suddenly leans across the table and kisses her soundly.

Taken by surprise, she nevertheless kisses him back, and keeps his hand clasped between hers when he pulls away.

“I don’t want any of it to matter anymore.”

“You guys really went through some stuff, huh?”

“Some, yeah,” Will answers weakly.

“It’s okay,” Molly says, in answer to his unasked question. “But don’t try and shut me up with kisses!”

“That’s not–” Will protests, then, sheepishly, “That’s not _entirely_ what I was doing.”

“Please.”

They sit smiling down at their plates for the rest of the meal.

As they are doing the dishes, Will asks, “Why are you thinking about him, anyway?”

“Well, I started out being worried about you in general, and that’s where I ended up.”

Will regrets asking.

“You get why I’m worried, right?”

“You mean, why _I_ worry you?”

“Sure.”

“I guess I’d _get it_ if I thought about it.”

“But you’re not going to? Think about it?”

Will sighs, and orders himself not to snap at Molly, but he sounds unquestionably defensive when he says, “You’re worried it’s going to be like last time.” He takes a breath. “That _I’m_ going to be how I was last time. When it went bad.”

“Don’t say it like that. Like it soured. We _had_ to split up. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

“Wasn’t it?”

This silences Molly for a full minute. Then, very quietly, but equally firm, she stresses, “It _wasn’t_ your fault.”

Will looks over to see that she’s crying. He puts down the dishcloth, but she looks like she might swat him if he tried to hug her. She doesn’t need comforting. She needs Will to stop feeling sorry for himself. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, hoping to vaporize the self pity fast. “I guess I have regrets,” he starts quietly, leaning back against the counter. “And I’ve been ignoring them really well for the past ten years, but, turns out they’re still there.”

“I figured.” She sniffs as she pulls the drain stopper out and rinses off her hands. They both watch the last of the suds disappear into the plumbing. She turns and faces him. “How about we go to bed, and you can ignore them for the right reasons?”


	13. Is That a Euphemism?

It rains that night, and the sound of dripping eaves follows Will into his dreams.

_The office is toasty warm, though outside the drawn curtains, the weather is waging war against the windowpanes. They rattle, as do Will’s nerves when he sees Hannibal sitting in his usual chair, and Molly sitting across from him._

_Apparently invisible to them, Will watches from the chaise-lounge in what should be plain sight. It’s impossible to tell if he’d come into the middle of some telepathic communication, or if they are simply sitting there waiting for the other to start. It’s supremely unsettling, and Will lets out a huge sigh of relief when Molly finally speaks._

_“So, no matter what he says he wants, you’ll take him anyway?”_

_“I want what’s best for Will.”_

_“We all do.”_

_“Other people’s discomfort is uncomfortable for him.”_

_“It is for anyone who’s not a psychopath,” Molly points out. “It costs him more. I know it. But isn’t it better for him, then, to be with people who are happy?”_

_“Happiness itself is a spectrum, and he will always know where on it you lie.”_

_“So what?”_

_“He will know when you’re not on it. Even if you don’t.”_

_“That’s… bold of you.”_

_“He feels the weight of other people’s emotions, regardless of whether or not they’ve managed to spare themselves the pain.”_

_“Bolder.”_

_“How so?”_

_“You don’t know me. Yet you say all this as though my becoming unhappy is inevitable.”_

_“I have spent a good deal of time listening to people who are trying to claw their way back to a happiness they once had.”_

_Molly smiles a little. “You mean you don’t have loads of happy people in therapy?”_

_Hannibal smiles back, and a chill creeps up Will’s spine. “Very few.”_

_“So… maybe you’re not really an expert on the subject?” Molly suggests._

_Will’s heart stops for a moment, but Hannibal laughs, seeming charmed by her candour. “Maybe not,” he concedes. “But I do know that Will lives a fraught existence, that rarely allows peace or even rest, let alone happiness_ _.”_

_“I’ve seen him at peace.”_

_“He will never be so entirely. His empathy won’t let him.”_

_“You talk about it like it’s an illness.”_

_“It is a condition…” Hannibal leans back in his chair and regards Molly with a probing look, perhaps curious if she could be intimidated without him standing and moving towards her._

_Will is worried about just that, and once again breathes a sigh of relief when Hannibal, though getting downright diagnostic with his language, remains in his seat._

_“A condition that is made worse by his often being the cause of upset, due to his lack of tact, in combination with self-preservation strategies that are off-putting.”_

_Molly does not appear cowed, but does seem to be tired of this conversation. She says, simply, “Wally and I have thick skin.”_

_“Still, it is a burden, and comes with a slew of compulsions and obsessions.”_

_“I know that.” Molly stands and paces the width of the room, waiting until her back is to Hannibal before rolling her eyes. “I knew it before you ever did. It never mattered.”_

_“He is a genius.”_

_“Am I not smart enough for him?” She goes over to the statuette of the stag and touches its antlers. “Or cultured enough?” She looks back at Hannibal and gives him a smile. “I haven’t been to an art gallery since our eleventh-grade field trip.”_

_“As you pointed out, I do not know you, but I can’t imagine you’re slow.”_

_“I skipped two grades.”_

_Hannibal has the courtesy not to point out that he skipped primary school entirely. “Certainly not slow, then.”_

_Molly chuckles, and discloses, “I was seven.”_

_Hannibal gives an answering chuckle, then digs a little deeper, prompting her with the statement, “Intelligent children are often teased.”_

_“Nobody noticed. Our town was tiny. We had lots of mixed-grade classes. By the time I was seven, nobody knew what grade anyone was in anymore. Age didn’t matter yet.”_

_“Surely it came to matter.”_

_She shrugs. “Not really. All kids are interested in is the month and the day, so they know when the next party is. You just assume everyone in your grade was born in the same year.”_

_“You never told anyone?”_

_“I never told Will, if that’s what you mean.”_

It’s more the sort of thing Will would say than Molly, and the break in character almost pulls him right out of the dream. He doesn’t wake, though, and Molly answers in her own voice this time:

 _“I didn’t_ have _to tell Will. He did his own math.”_

_“Did he confront you about it?”_

_“You know Will. Things are always a little confrontational with him. He didn’t mean to get so angry.”_

_“Didn’t he?” A small smirk appears on Hannibal’s lips._

_“He wasn’t accusing me of anything.”_

_“Of course not.”_

_“He just panicked.”_

_“Indeed.”_

_“Wouldn’t you? If you wanted to be a police officer and suddenly realized that you might have committed statutory rape if you’d met your girlfriend even a month earlier?”_

_“I can’t begin to imagine how that felt.” It’s only a miniscule curve of his upper lip, but Hannibal is still smirking._

_Molly returns to her chair and sits back down. After some silence, she asks, “Why did Will never tell you about me?”_

_Hannibal cocks his head to one side. “Perhaps he thought I would spoil you.”_

_“Me? Or the memory of me?”_

_With a fully predatory glint in his eye, Hannibal states calmly, “Both.”_

Will wakes with a start, and, heart pounding, checks that Molly is still breathing before searching the dark room to reassure himself that they’re alone. Is this why he got such a clammy, sick feeling at the idea of Hannibal meeting Molly? Because Hannibal might _like_ Molly?

Yes. Because it would be worse for Molly if Hannibal liked her, than if he despised her.

Woken by Will’s panicked movement and his trembling hand on her chest, Molly sits up behind him and loops her arms about his waist. “What’s the matter hotshot?” she asks sleepily.

His shirt is damp around the collar and he grabs it and pulls it over his head before she nuzzles her nose into it.

She yawns into his shoulder blade, her lips grazing the scar tissue there. Suddenly, she is very still. “I remember this,” she whispers. “I got real mad at you…”

“Sure did.”

“I’m selfish, huh?”

He turns and holds her tightly, the sudden force of his embrace making them fall back against the sheets and pillows. “I don’t care,” he says fiercely, through clenched teeth.

She clings to him and shoves her face into his chest. “Me neither.”

A spiral-bound copy of Will’s course manual comes in the mail, for final alterations before it’s published. Molly asks if he wants help proofreading. Will tells her not to worry about it. Molly says, _what if I’m bored?_ and Will caves.

They drive into town to get the manuscript photocopied. He wants to go through it first and leave the truly gruesome cases out, but Molly points out that it’s a waste of his time and defeats the purpose of her helping him.

“I’ll just skip over the case studies,” she assures him.

They take an extremely scenic route home so Will can practice driving. He doesn’t feel _confidence_ when they get home safely and with no mishaps, but he does feel a buoyancy that doesn’t fade within twenty minutes.

Molly assigns herself the introduction and first three lessons, and they sit together in the living room, a manuscript each.

“Find anything?” Will asks, after an hour or so.

Molly looks up and shakes her head. “Just a few missing commas.”

“Really? Just that? I’m not seeing any happy-faces in the margins.”

A wicked smile begins to form on her lips. “Also a few… dangling participles.”

“That a euphemism?”

“Nope. Could be, though.”

Still feeling energized, Will tosses their work to the floor and crawls on top of Molly, who lies back against the couch cushions, giggling. He nuzzles her neck and says, “I’m going to earn those happy-faces somehow…”

On Saturday, Will finds Molly sitting on the porch steps, enjoying the early morning sun. He comes and sits behind her, and she leans back against him with her elbows on his knees.

“Where’s Walter?” he asks, putting an arm about her shoulders.

She lifts a hand to stroke his forearm, leaning to the side to offer him a sip of her coffee. “At Tommy’s.”

“Already? It’s not even nine o’clock.”

“He slept over there last night. Evelyn promised she’d drop him off early, though. They’ll be here soon.”

Will goes back inside to fetch a long-sleeve shirt. When he rejoins her, Molly frowns and says, “You don’t have to cover that up.”

_They’re ugly._

_I don’t think so._

Will shrugs.

“Wally’s going to see it eventually.”

“I don’t want to scare him.”

“It’ll be scarier if he sees it by accident,” she says pointedly.

Will’s cheeks redden. “What do I tell him?”

“I was thinking about that…”

“And?”

“You were sick, right?”

“I still did it.”

“But you weren’t in your right mind. It _was_ an accident, even though you did it on purpose.”

“Yeah, the _on purpose_ part is the problem. What if he asks questions? I couldn’t even explain to _you_ …”

“It was an accident. You can leave it at that. Just tell him you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Does that work with ten-year-olds?”

“It’ll work with _my_ ten-year-old. He’s the _best_ ten-year-old.”

They see a vehicle in the distance turn onto Will’s quiet country road, and watch it approach. “Why’d he sleep over at Tommy’s anyway? They just spent the whole week together.”

Molly shakes her head. “Apparently they didn’t get put in the same group. I guess the bus ride back to school wasn’t enough time for them to compare notes properly.” She hops up when the minivan pulls into the driveway.

Walter bounces out when Molly opens the child-locked sliding door. She chats for a bit with Evelyn through the driver’s side window. Will can’t make out her face through the glare on the windshield, but, at one point, the woman’s outline acknowledges Will with a wave. He raises a hand and nods vaguely in return.

When the van pulls out of the drive once more, Molly clutches her chest dramatically. “I’m wounded!” she tells Walter. “Tommy got to hear all your stories before I did!”

Walter, equally dramatic, flaps his arms in protest. “Well, Tommy had loads of stories, too! What did _you_ guys do this week?”

“Okay.” Molly sits back down, but next to Will, on the top step. “We were pretty boring, I guess.”

Walter is only able to sit for about ten seconds. Then, he is up again, acting out his week in the wilderness.

Hearing about Walter’s adventures fills Will with guilt, and he can’t immediately identify why. At first he mistakes it for nostalgia, then he realizes that the nostalgia wouldn’t be his. He listens with one ear, the guilty feeling allowing whispers of Abigail through the walls of his fort, into the other. Molly had joked about not being the first to hear Walter’s stories and it clearly didn’t bother her, so what about that is rendering him grief-struck?

 _Walter has a friend._ It’s that simple. A friend his own age – someone to swap stories with before reporting to the family. The regret Will feels is similar to what he felt imagining Beverly Katz drinking beer with Abigail on this same porch.

How could Will have ever thought that what he and Hannibal were offering Abigail was a life? This, here, is concrete. No moorings built on sand – Molly is the kind of bedrock Jack could only ever dream of being.

There is always either laughter in the house, or quiet contentment. When there is friction between Will and Molly, or Molly and Walter, it disappears in a reasonable amount of time, because all of them want it to be that way. Problems are approached with the actual intention of solving them, and solving them is the entire agenda. Will had tried to solve Abigail’s problems – he’s more or less sure that Hannibal tried, too, in his circuitous way – but they were never all seeking resolution (or even temporary cessation of hostilities) at the same time.

The memories haven’t faded. Once called upon, Will would be able to remember every tiny detail. Instead, everything about the past three years becomes utterly surreal, and remembering anything from that time is like walking through an absurdist’s performance art exhibit – vivid and nonsensical. Maybe it was all a dream.

Maybe he’d be okay with that.


	14. Taller & Fatter

Will’s strolls through this gallery of the surreal tend to be long, and how often he goes on them seems to be entirely out of his hands. In the days following his disturbing dream about Molly and Hannibal, Will finds himself strolling more frequently, and, when it begins to feel more like pacing, he goes for the drink. More thinking, more drinking – it will hurt just that little bit less. It’s more a premise than an actual argument, and Will is beginning to accept the premise that it might always be that way.

 _I’m doing it, though_ ¸ he tells the Hannibal part of himself. _I_ am _thinking about you._

He’s thinking about how, over such a short period of time, they, themselves, became Abigail’s biggest problem. No small feat. It doesn’t matter how they got to that point; what is shameful is that they’d reached it at all. Will is also beginning to accept that he will never stop feeling guilty about being a problem that no one – least of all himself – could solve.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t mind that, while the memories remain vivid and whole, they are becoming so abstracted, he can hardly believe any of it actually happened. He continues subsisting on his workshop stash, so the contents of the whiskey bottle don’t disappear fast enough to make Molly worry.

Monday morning, Will sits at his desk, books cleared off entirely now, and fly-tying gear properly reinstated. Balanced between his forefinger and the wood is the gold band that had been living at the very back of his desk drawer. He is thinking about putting it on, what that would mean, and what Molly would think.

Fresh out of the shower, Molly comes in and leans against the desk in a terry cloth robe with her hair in a towel. “Morning, hotshot. Found something shiny?”

“Not so shiny anymore.”

“I sold mine,” she says softly, sadly, as though they’d slipped out without her even thinking the words through. She wrinkles her nose and bites the inside of her cheek. “Are you mad?”

“Christ, no, Molly. You have a kid.”

Molly smiles.

Will immediately starts down a rabbit hole. Is she smiling because she’s relieved? Did she think he’d actually be mad? _Should_ he be mad? Is she smiling because she has no words prepared because she was expecting him to be hurt? Again, _should_ he be? Is she secretly hurt that he isn’t? That last thought puts itself and all the others to bed. She’s smiling because she’s Molly, and she does that, often. Him looking for hidden agendas doesn’t change the way she smiles. Will smiles back.

She turns her head to look out the window. “You have a bunch of kids,” she says, nodding at the dogs running around outside. “What are you doing with it?”

“I was gonna see if it still fits.”

Molly snickers. “Right, because of all the growing you’ve been doing?”

He frowns at her, in as much as he can.

“Come on.” She giggles. “Walter’s gonna end up taller than you, and I’m gonna end up fatter.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Will grumbles. “ _Not_ about the fat,” he adds hastily.

Molly fully throws her head back when she laughs, and the towel slips off. She starts rubbing her hair dry in chunks.

“How tall is his father anyway?”

“A little taller than you, Will,” Molly answers with a smirk.

“So there’s a real chance.”

She pats his head.

“Oh, god. Go away.”

She laughs again and, as she walks away, says, “No. No chance. Because my little boy is going to be ten forever. I’ve decided.”

Later that day, when she gets home from school, Molly comes and sits next to Will in her usual fashion; one leg tucked under the other and elbow on the back of the sofa, looking at him squarely. “I think it’s great. What you were really doing with the ring.”

“Wow, right to it, huh?”

“I’ve been thinking about it all day! No time for _hello_. Hello, now, though.” She gives him a kiss on the cheek. “How was your day?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I don’t know where it went.”

“One of _those_ days, huh.”

“I guess I did some thinking, too.”

“What did you come up with?”

“That you’re probably right.” He pushes the sleeve of his shirt up partway, looking down at his mess of an arm with distaste. “I should just show it to Walter. Get it over with.”

“You know; you’re _not_ going to scare him. I should have said that before.”

“No?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe if your arm were all bloody… but they’re just scars now.”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just…” He pulls the sleeve of his shirt back down and mumbles, “It’s really fucking embarrassing, Molly.”

“I thought that might be it. Any way I can convince you it isn’t?”

“Probably not.”

“Okay, well then I’ll just _tell_ you, you don’t need to be embarrassed showing Walter, because he’s _ten_. He’s not going to imagine it’s any more complex than you tell him it is.”

“You’re right.”

“Yeah, I know.” She smiles and scoots closer to lay her head on his shoulder. “I wish you wouldn’t be embarrassed about it though.”

“How was _your_ day?”

“We had our last softball practice. Last game is on Thursday. Against Walter’s school, actually.”

“How will you pick what colour to wear?”

“Bring two different shirts and quick-change between innings?”

Will chuckles, and then they are quiet for a minute or two. He starts playing with Molly’s hair. “Um… I could go…” he offers slowly, at length. “If you want me to.”

She sits up and beams at him. “Would you? Walter would love that.”

Will smiles back, but feels panic lying in wait. “He would?” he asks dubiously, then, with forced levity, “What colour do I wear?”

“Blue,” Molly says easily. “That would be so nice, Will.” She lays her head back down.

Will has another thought, and suddenly feels more guilt than panic. “Sorry I didn’t offer before…”

“Sorry I never invited you.” She looks up at him through her lashes. “Actually, I’m not. I was pretty sure it’d be about five of your worst nightmares combined.”

“You were very right.”

“You sure you want to come this time?”

“ _Sure_ is a strong word. I’ll be there though.”

Molly rearranges herself so she’s straddling him. “I _sure_ do love you, you know.”

Will wonders if they’re ever going to talk about the other night, when he made her cry. Maybe there isn’t anything to say. Any conversation they might have about it is forestalled, though, and he ends up wondering, instead, how it is that Molly’s lips never seem to tire of his.

They stop when their breathing starts getting really heavy, remembering that Walter could be home any minute. Will lets Molly finish unbuttoning the long sleeve, leaving just a plain grey t-shirt underneath. As she is pulling it off his shoulders, the ring falls out of the breast pocket, bounces off the seat and lands between the couch cushions.

“What was that?” Molly dismounts and fishes around until she finds it.

Will, deciding in a split second that he doesn’t want to continue their discussion with his arm exposed, pulls the shirt back on, though he leaves it unbuttoned.

Molly holds the ring in her open palm and they both stare down at it.

Will asks, “What did you mean, you _think it’s great_?”

Molly, for all her straightforwardness at the beginning of their conversation, mulls over her words for some time. “We’re having a nice time, Wally and me both,” she says eventually. “Are you?”

Sure that any attempt to express _how_ nice a time he’s having will sound cheap, Will just nods.

“Good. So, look, I don’t want you to feel you have to label it, because, you know, _a rose by any other name_ ¸ and all that. But you _are_ thinking about it, obviously, so – for our own clarity – are we trying again? Is that what’s happening?”

Will manages to say, “Looks like it,” before his chest starts tightening. Before his throat is too raw, he adds, tentatively, “Do you want to?”

Molly nods, blurting out, “I missed you. I think I never stopped missing you.”

When Walter gets home, Will hears his customarily noisy arrival from the kitchen. Not long after Molly’s and his resolution, it was determined that dinner needed to be started. Molly asked if he wanted help cooking, allowing him to say _no_ , without having to directly ask for some time alone to think things through.

After his recent viewing of it, the image of his damaged arm remains lodged in his mind, and he treats it gingerly, like the wounds might open up again if he moves it the wrong way. The ring feels heavy in his jeans pocket, and he is no more decided on what to do with it. Molly said she thinks he should wait, at least until Walter knows, and Will is both relieved that he doesn’t have to make a decision right now, and preemptively frustrated by the fifty different flip-flops he’s inevitably going to do to reach one.

He keeps the anxiety at bay for the time being by reliving Molly’s lips pressed against his, and the look on her face when she said, _I never stopped missing you._

Eventually, Will joins Molly and Walter in the living room.

“Hey, Will.”

“Hey, kid. How was school?”

“School was okay. Practice was fun.” Walter doesn’t take any significant pause after these two statements, before going on to say, “Mom says you have scars from your accident.”

“Yeah. A bunch of them.” Will lowers his eyes. Reluctantly, he asks, “Do you want to see?” When Walter nods emphatically, Will starts to roll up his sleeve, and Walter leans forward to look.

“Ewww!”

“Hey!” Molly warns. She is watching the exchange over the open book in her hand.

Walter is more fascinated than revolted, though. Like a kid in science class being taught how to make slime. “What happened?! Was it a car accident?” Walter has another thought, and gasps. “Did something happen in the workshop? Was it the band saw?”

Molly puts her book aside and tugs Walter onto her lap. She gives him a reprimanding tickle and says, “Don’t push your luck with the questions, kid.”

Walter shrieks and squirms out of her hold. “’Kay. Sorry, Will.” He goes back to diligently transcribing something onto cue cards.

Will sits next to Molly, and knows his face must be red when his cheek feels burning hot against the hand she has pressed to it. She takes up her book again, but holds his bad arm in her lap, absently stroking it from elbow to wrist. When she turns the page, she takes a second to lift his hand and give it a few quick kisses.

Will buries his face in her hair, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing his lips against her scalp until they stop trembling and the threat of tears has passed.

At one point, Walter looks up from the coffee table, and, seeing how they are sitting, asks if they’re getting back together.

“Maybe,” Molly says, and teases, “What’s it to ya, kid?”

“I like being here,” he answers, simply. “I wanna stay.”

After dinner, they watch Walter practice his speech. Molly puts Will’s arm around her and cuddles right up against him. He starts playing with her hair again. It is thick and soft and feels nice against his palm as he cards through it. Molly has a sweet, contented smile on her face, and, perhaps for the first time since their arrival, Will doesn’t entirely dismiss the idea that he might be part of the reason for it.


End file.
